Red

"I think this is a very exciting book. It’s very refreshing and interesting that the poems are around the colour red rather than addressing race. It feels like a moved-on anthology. And it’s surprising what poems have come out just taking randomly the colour red as opposed to blue or black or green. Red diamonds, red running shoes, the infinity of red, roses, blood, seeing red. All sorts of interesting poems. There are poets in here whose work I know really well, like Fred D’Aguiar. And there are poets whose work I’m only slightly familiar with or whose prose I know, but poetry I didn’t know, like Tishani Doshi. Bernardine Evaristo, whose work I’ve known for a while, is in here with a poem called ‘Revenge’. It’s probably one of my favourite poems in the whole book. There are poems by a writer I only met for the first time the other night. He’s called Nii Ayikwei Parks and his poems and his voice I found really great. But there’s so much talent in here, it’s just really exciting to find all of this talent collected in the one book. It’s been ordered alphabetically and that seems to work as well. I think that black British poets haven’t quite broken through in the way some black British novelists have and that still has got to happen. So I hope books like this will make a difference. Poetry itself is a marginalised art form and then within the poetry world you get poets that are further marginalised, and it’s two things rather than one. I think there is a racism out there that thinks of black people as being good performance poets but not good page poets. That kind of attitude has dogged the work of a lot of black writers in this country. In America you do have senior figures like Maya Angelou and Alice Walker – major, major figures – and they have more of a sense of a history with Langston Hughes. Americans know what it’s like to have a senior figure occupy that space. And in Britain it’s not quite the same. There are people like Derek Walcott but they’re not based here. There aren’t poets here who have been given that stature."