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Click for more detail about Filigree: Contemporary Black British Poetry by Kadija Sesay Filigree: Contemporary Black British Poetry

by Kadija Sesay
INSCRIBE (Nov 01, 2018)
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Filigree typically refers to the finer elements of craftwork, the parts that are subtle; our Filigree anthology contains work that plays with the possibilities that the word suggests, work that is delicate, that responds to the idea of edging, to a comment on the marginalisation of the darker voice. Filigree includes work from established Black British poets residing inside and outside the UK; new and younger emerging voices of Black Britain and Black poets who have made it their home as well as a selection of poets the Inscribe project has nurtured and continue to support.

“I finished this new anthology of black poets in Britain with ‘ghee on my lips’ as Roger Robinson writes in ‘Repast,’ with a sated appetite, but wanting more — more of the lives that came spinning from its pages. There are testimonies and remembrances here, poems of resistance and bombast, and hymns of love of all kinds. But what struck me most is the varied and accomplished craft of these writers – the link with poetics and traditions past, but always with an eye to renewal and invention.” Hannah Lowe

“How precious is poetry? Why does language sparkle when our ears becomes our eyes? What if we could wear only poems and punctuate it with our nakedness? There is something about blackness that will always remind me of gravity. How else to explain that we are everywhere. Why should an ocean come between us? History is nothing but a map from the past to the present. Black poets are not simply dreamers, instead we are explorers mapping our faith and turning evidence into something all can see. Hold a book of poems by black poets in your hands and the sun will never say farewell to one’s shadow. What nourishes the spirit also feeds the heart. We hunger for words as if we once invented taste. Now comes a book filled with splendor; this is black light come to illuminate the world. Whatever breaks in these poems is something shaped by craft and all things beautiful.”
E. Ethelbert Miller