Postcolonial Love Poem

"Exactly, yes, these are all books published in the UK and Ireland. Natalie Diaz is published here by Faber. Actually, that’s another thing I think is great about the Forward Prize—it puts a spotlight on UK publishing while also being very open. It puts Britain on the international stage, and embraces poets from all over the world who are being published over here. It won’t be long before Natalie Diaz is well known among British readers. I felt rather happy that this book had only just come out, so we had a chance to showcase it early on and celebrate it. This is a really big voice—she’s a writer of epic in some ways—but what’s interesting is the mix of big-ness and small-ness, amplitude and intimacy. She brings to the surface the long history of Mojave culture, exploring its relationships with mainstream American culture, and with global ecology. She’s working on huge scales here, but at the same time writing love poetry. There’s a great deal about one-to-one human love. She finds the rhythms of sympathy, of eroticism, the sensuality of the simple touch on a waist, or of legs in motion, running and jumping. What’s really special, I think, and what I hope people will respond to, is the way Diaz fuses feelings common across nations with the intimacy of loving another person. Yes. It follows an earlier collection of hers about her brother’s troubles and addictions. This continues, in part, with that family story. There are some very moving poems celebrating the athleticism of her family, and in particular her younger brother. We speak the language of emotion through basketball, through running. God knows I’m not one for playing any sports at all. But she has this almost baroque sensibility—she sees the golden light on a leaping leg, and she makes us feel a kind of truth in what the body says when it’s moving. This is not a sentimental book. It’s too baroque to be sentimental, somehow. It’s too ornate in its language, too resonant with the divergent voices of other writers. There’s a great deal of conviction in it. I think outright conviction can read oddly here in Britain, particularly among readers who deeply value understatement and irony and doubt. But there’s an elusive quality in Diaz, she’s interested in the echo of voices beyond her own, and her conviction carries weight."