Description

Bloodaxe Books, paperback

Publication Date: July 12, 2022

Publisher Marketing:John Agard has been broadening the canvas of British poetry for the past 40 years with his mischievous, satirical fables which overturn all our expectations. His ninth Bloodaxe collection, Border Zone, explores a far-reaching canvas of British/Caribbean transatlantic connections, sweeping across centuries and continents. His border territory ranges from Love in a Sceptred Isle, a novella-like narrative poem of a romance between Barbados-born photographer, Victor, and Welsh librarian, Rihannon, told with lyrical tenderness and thought-provoking wit, to “Casanova the Philosopher,” a sequence of sonnets in the voice of the legendary Venetian philosophically observing 18th-century English ways in a tongue-in-cheek memoir and travelogue. This is a diverse collection where the thought-provokingly mischievous, bawdy and elegiac rub shoulders alongside the sequence “The Plants Are Staying Put” with the poet turning overnight lockdown gardener as well as calypso poems, where the Guyana-born winner of the Queens Gold Medal for Poetry puts on his hat as poetsonian, a term he coined in the 80s in tribute to the inventive lyrics of the calypsonian, a crucial strand of Agards varied, innovative, and often satirical poetic output.