2013

Kei Miller (b.1978), born in Jamaica, came to MNS’s attention when he was studying for his MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. The book under discussion here, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (2014) won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and few who were at the South Bank that evening will forget the huge audience’s emotional and jubilant response when that award was announced. Interviewed for the Carcanet blog before the announcement, Miller commented, ‘I think a lot of writing by black post-colonial subjects – in order to be taken seriously – has to hide their politics under subtlety. It makes us seem more savvy and rational and nuanced. But this book isn’t so much interested in burying. Instead it bears witness. Sometimes it bares its teeth and its claws.’¹

FROM: MICHAEL SCHMIDT

9 June 2013 at 18:55

Dear Kei

I like the book very much. I attach it with a number of comments, questions and suggestions from which you will see a pattern emerging. I hope that in certain places you can curb the elements dictated by performance rather than orality, a tendency to orotundity which is not quite earned, and a use of phrases which have a kind of Dylan Thomas abandon about them, often genitive constructions. There is also the burning issue of definite articles, and I hope you will review, whether to agree or not is up to you. There are some places where small adjustments are needed and others where I expect the problem is my ear for dialect.

      The main thing I hope you can do is trust metaphor when it will bear your weight (avoiding seems and perhapses) and push yourself towards greater variation in syntactical patterning and also parataxis which will modulate and nuance your voice. You are such a good performer that sometimes that big beautiful voice dictates a poetry that is less tense and considered than it ought to be.

      All that said, the ensemble is satisfying indeed. I am not sure (I am not sure that you are sure) that the basic trajectory is complete yet. I like the way it fits with the earlier books.sup>2

      Bravo, a good sabbatical then! Give me a bell this week or next for a palaver if you can.

Abrazos
Michael xx

FROM: KEI MILLER

9 June 2013 at 23:06

Thank you for such wonderful feedback! I apologize in particular for what I left as the bones of a villanelle ‘The Day of the Watchman’ to be filled in. In any case, I subsequently finished it, and then deleted it – as I did some other poems. I tried hard not to play my usual switcharoo game. Two words I worry about now that are almost fundamental Rastafari words – ‘Sights’ (which I wanted instead of cites), but more importantly ‘Trods’ – which is the only way a Rastafarian would talk about his journey. I think I have to keep it, but I want to signal that I am doing it purposely.³

      It won’t be long before I send you something revised – maybe with a few new poems you haven’t seen, and a new order – but much closer to what I want.

Thanks again!
K

FROM: KEI MILLER

29 June 2013 22:03

Dear Michael (and Helen),⁴

Here is the collection revised, and much closer to something I like. As said, the order is now quite different – a few poems have been removed, and about 10 poems have been added.

      While I took on most of your suggestions, there are a couple I ignored for strong reasons, but some I ignored for less strong reasons and though I retain them now it’s not that I’m unbudge-able. ‘the crawling brawl of vines’ for instance – the sound of which I love, or ‘the dylan-esque’ ‘that pack the purple band of evening’. I tried these without but each time, after a week, I restored them. Do you feel strongly?

Kei

*

When Kei Miller applied for a place on the MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, he had a fully funded place offered at another institution, but it was clear to me that he had to come to MMU: his submitted portfolio was extraordinary. He went on from Manchester to Glasgow – where I later taught – for his PhD. If you are lucky enough as a teacher, occasionally a student comes along who adjusts your way of seeing your discipline and its place in the world. Kei is a compelling performer of his poems and his lectures, the kind who makes readerly demands on his audience because his writing is so deeply invested in language and its various incarnations and weathers. He treated me less as a remote professor and more as a friend, so that there was a continual sense of exchange with him, and therefore of changed horizons. Unfortunately, we did not publish his first book of poems, Kingdom of Empty Bellies (Heaventree Press), an omission I regret. It appeared shortly before The New Caribbean Poetry, an anthology he edited, which was his first Carcanet book. The anthology signalled those changed horizons: the recent poets laureate of Jamaica – Mervyn Morris and Lorna Goodison – are on the Carcanet list, and the Caribbean has provided two of our most exciting younger authors this century.

NOTES

1. https://carcanetblog.blogspot.com/2014/07/spotlight-onauthor-interview-with-kei.html (accessed 7 July 2019)
2. Carcanet published his second collection, There is an Anger that Moves (2007), and A Light Song of Light (2010); the latest, In Nearby Bushes came out in 2019. Miller has also published novels and short stories.
3. In the same interview, Miller observed that ‘sometimes the way that language alienates is part of the poetic effect you want to achieve and obviously there are so many times in this book where I want to play with this effect of alienation by language. […] Rastafari communities are often in disputes over land which governments have appropriated from them; what I don’t want to do is to appropriate their language which is one of the last things they have.’
4. Helen Tookey (b. 1969) was editorial and production manager at Carcanet 2012–14. She now teaches creative writing at Liverpool John Moores University. Carcanet published her debut collection Missel-Child (2014); her second collection, City of Departures (2019) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection.

THE YEAR IN BOOKS

      John Ashbery, Quick Question

      Iain Bamforth, The Crossing Fee

      Chris Beckett, Ethiopia Boy

      Gottfried Benn, Selected Poems and Prose, translated by David Paisey

      Tara Bergin, This is Yarrow

      Sujata Bhatt, Collected Poems

      Caroline Bird, The Hat-Stand Union

      Eavan Boland, New Selected Poems

      Alison Brackenbury, Then

      Lucy Burnett, Leaf Graffiti

      Richard Crashaw, Selected Poems, edited by Robin Holloway

      Fred D’Aguiar, The Rose of Toulouse

      Peter Davidson, Distance and Memory

      Iain Galbraith and Robyn Marsack (eds), Oxford Poets 2013: an anthology

      John Gallas, 52 Euros: Containing 26 Men and 26 Women in a Double A-Z of European Poets in Translation

      Lorna Goodison, Oracabessa

      Rebecca Goss, Her Birth

      Grey Gowrie, The Italian Visitor

      Jorie Graham, The Taken-Down God: selected poems 1997–2008

      John Greening, To the War Poets

      Thomas Kinsella, Late Poems

      David Morley, The Gypsy and the Poet

      Sinéad Morrissey, Parallax

      Stanley Moss, No Tear is Commonplace

      Raymond Queneau, Hitting the Streets, translated by Rachel Galvin

      Frederic Raphael, There and Then: Personal Terms VI

      Gareth Reeves, Nuncle Music, with drawings by Barrie Ormsby

      Michel Remy (ed), On the Thirteenth Stroke of Midnight: surrealism in Britain

      Muriel Spark, Mary Shelley

      Chris Wallace-Crabbe, New and Selected Poems

      Rory Waterman, Tonight the Summer’s Over

      John Whale, Frieze