There is an Anger That Moves

Reviews / Votes

'Miller's charming second collection [There Is an Anger that Moves] is an affectionately jaunty glimpse of a life caught between the cold and baffling England he has adopted and the fiery warmth of his Jamaican home.'

No. 7 in 'The Ten Best New poetry collections' - The Independent, 2007 'Raise high the roofbeams, here comes a strong new presence in poetry...Kei Miller's is a voice we will hear much more of, for it speaks and sings with rare confidence and authority.'

Lorna Goodison 'Some of the most exciting poetry I've read in years. Radiant utterance that speaks of island experiences and gender politics from a deep well of understanding, with empathy, humour and insight. An extraordinary new voice singing with clarity and grace.'

Olive Senior In the Jamaican poet Kei Miller's second collection, published since his move to the UK, the first and strongest sequence, 'In This New Country', is a tribute to the strangeness of arriving in a Britain already colonised by Jamaicans 'in reverse' (the term is Louise Bennett's): 'Walking through Peckham / in London, West Moss Road in Manchester, / you pass green and yellow shops / where tie-headwomen bargain over the price / of dasheen'. Similar contradictions abound. The speaker, who is only a mediocre dancer back home, 'can dance / dances that have fallen out / of season, like mangoes in February' yet be adored as some exotic god: 'in this country, you move like fire / amongst the cane, you move like sugar / and like ocean'. The collection is full of such haunting images, and as in the prolific Miller's earlier books (the short stories in Fear of Stones and a previous collection of poems, Kingdom of Empty Bellies) the sacred and the profane commingle: 'you say bomboclawt / softly, like a prayer'. Most shockingly, a whimsical rhapsody on the 'revolutionary properties' of Ben & Jerry's ice cream suddenly plunges into darker terrain:

Rory's story begins in New York

in a parlour that does not sell swirls

or double cones, one flavour atop another.

A sign at the door says: No Mixing!

And when he was in love with a black man

they went to this store and thought

the sign was for them -

that the owner was upset not because

they were gay, but because one was a nigger-lover,

and the other a nigger.

This ability to reveal seething and hybrid impulses beneath the mask of identity is Miller's greatest strength in this poised, sardonic volume of poems. Though at times overly self-conscious, his writing shows that Caribbean poetry can move beyond the strictures of modernism without ghettoising itself into either the 'black' or 'performance' markets. In the Jamaican poet Kei Miller's second collection, published since his move to the UK, the first and strongest sequence, 'In This New Country', is a tribute to the strangeness of arriving in a Britain already colonised by Jamaicans 'in reverse' (the term is Louise Bennett's): 'Walking through Peckham / in London, West Moss Road in Manchester, / you pass green and yellow shops / where tie-headwomen bargain over the price / of dasheen'. Similar contradictions abound. The speaker, who is only a mediocre dancer back home, 'can dance / dances that have fallen out / of season, like mangoes in February' yet be adored as some exotic god: 'in this country, you move like fire / amongst the cane, you move like sugar / and like ocean'. The collection is full of such haunting images, and as in the prolific Miller's earlier books (the short stories in Fear of Stones and a previous collection of poems, Kingdom of Empty Bellies) the sacred and the profane commingle: 'you say bomboclawt / softly, like a prayer'. Most shockingly, a whimsical rhapsody on the 'revolutionary properties' of Ben & Jerry's ice cream suddenly plunges into darker terrain:

Rory's story begins in New York

in a parlour that does not sell swirls

or double cones, one flavour atop another.

A sign at the door says: No Mixing!

And when he was in love with a black man

they went to this store and thought

the sign was for them -

that the owner was upset not because

they were gay, but because one was a nigger-lover,

and the other a nigger.

This ability to reveal seething and hybrid impulses beneath the mask of identity is Miller's greatest strength in this poised, sardonic volume of poems. Though at times overly self-conscious, his writing shows that Caribbean poetry can move beyond the strictures of modernism without ghettoising itself into either the 'black' or 'performance' markets.