In Nearby Bushes

Reviews / Votes

This is a book that offers a wise, colourful and unflinching look at contemporary Jamaica - good and bad - and anyone who loves language will find it utterly intoxicating.'

Roger Cox, The Scotsman 'This grab-you-by-the-collar collection uses the undergrowth as a symbol for Jamaica's dark side.'

Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph 'In Kei Miller's case, perceptions of Jamaica play out wittily through dialect and toponym, and are set against violent circumstances, explored with a profound awareness of their cultural and historical causes.'

W. N. Herbert, The Poetry Review 'Miller surpasses expectations for a book to be about something, as if a book's purpose were merely to convey information, or to create an experience. To read In Nearby Bushes is to be guided into thinking through things, however uncomfortable or uncanny.'

Vahni Capildeo 'Kei Miller has always had a distinct relationship to ideas of place, able - as the best cartographers are - to make sense of territory new or previously overlooked, and point us to why we should be looking there, and what we should be looking for: the stories that are being buried, being forgotten... This method of directing us to what we really need to pay attention to, and where it is happening, is at the core of Miller's latest collection'

Rishi Dastidar, Poetry London 'Miller's formal and linguistic inventiveness are at their best in his lively analysis of patois and etymology... Miller combines reportage, poetry, essay, psalmistry and erasure to show... the book of poems as a site of potential'

Dominic Leonard, Times Literary Supplement 'Miller deftly uses caesuras,line breaks and antimetabole to keep the reader pivoting between meanings, between growth and rot.'

Wasafari 'Lyrical contemplation brings to the fore the Jamaican landscape in which the collection is set and its inextricable relationship to racialized violence... The frequency with which these poems deploy the signifier bush but nevertheless find ways to reimagine its social, political, and aesthetic potentials suggests that we may no sooner exhaust our compulsion for clarity than our desire for obscurity.'

Joseph Fritsch, Public Books 'Miller's lush, contemplative poetic style is on full display, as is formal innovation with a boundary-breaking structure setting critical 'micro-essays' in conversation with verse ... This collection is a powerful testament to his acuity as both poet and critic.'

Sarah-Jean Zubair, Magma