In a collection that encompasses both Siri and the trickster god Anansi,
in his travels from West Africa via the Caribbean to Black working class
communities in the Midlands and North East of England, Degna Stone
demonstrates not only how well she tells stories, but also of her
awareness of the difficulties of communication, where "You know what
he's saying / but not what he's getting at", or where the injunction
against lying doesn't count in every situation. But if human
interactions are at the heart of her poems, she also writes with telling
precision about both place and animal nature. Not since Ted Hughes has
anyone written so totemically about the crow, ominous, but also
emblematic of tenacity, boldness and a harsh kind of beauty. When the
poet declares, "I want to be as black as the crows", it is much more
than an embrace of blackness in resistance to prejudice.
"It's a cliche of poetry that we often say that it transforms the
ordinary; this pamphlet disproves this, showing us that the ordinary and
everyday have always been transformational, and Degna's poems allow us
to see that. These are poems written from the outskirts -- of cities, of
love, of the body -- with a pure distillation of language where no word
is wasted."
Andrew McMillan
