80 Pages
©2014
Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
Purchase includes: EPUB, MOBI & PDF

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Winner of the 2014 Forward Prize for Best Collection
Shortlisted for the 2014 International Dylan Thomas Prize
Shortlisted for the 2014 Costa Book Awards for Poetry

In his new collection, acclaimed Jamaican poet Kei Miller dramatises what happens when one system of knowledge, one method of understanding place and territory, comes up against another. We watch as the cartographer, used to the scientific methods of assuming control over a place by mapping it (‘I never get involved / with the muddy affairs of land’), is gradually compelled to recognise – even to envy – a wholly different understanding of place, as he tries to map his way to the rastaman’s eternal city of Zion. As the book unfolds the cartographer learns that, on this island of roads that ‘constrict like throats’, every place-name comes freighted with history, and not every place that can be named can be found. 

The verse movement here, the interplay of sound values in inner rhyme and consonantal pairing, in fact the whole lyrical movement of the text, I find exemplary.—Peter Riley, Fortnightly Review