Border Zone

About the Book

John Agard's 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, Rhiannon, 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.

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.This is a diverse collection where the thought-provokingly mischievous, bawdy and elegaic rub shoulders alongside the sequence The Plants Are Staying Put with the poet turning overnight lockdown gardener as well as calypso poems, where the poet puts on his hat as 'poetsonian', a term he coined in the 80s in tribute to the inventive lyrics of the calypsonian.

Table of Contents:
Love in a Sceptred Isle 11 Love in a Sceptred Isle Navigating Continents 35 Flag Speaks 39 Windrush Postscript 40 A Citizen’s Tale 41 Doing My Bit for Pomp and Pageantry 42 Gents of the Gentry 43 With the Accent on Accent 46 The Discharge of the Un-light Brigade 48 How Delroy Dee Lost His Job at English Heritage House 51 Wall Speaks 52 Diversity in de Market 53 Potato Speaks 55 Biscuit Speaks 56 Meeting Old Father Thames 59 Pythias the Greek in Britannia 62 The Migration of Coconut Water 66 We Mosquitoes 68 Devon Jamboy Frederiksted, de Last of de Danish West Indians 71 Ice Speaks 72 The Murmur of the Forest in an Adjective 74 Saluting Derek 76 Walt 78 Dear Michael 80 A Farewell to Poet James Berry’s Hat 81 Gone But Still Spring Cleaning 83 Three Siblings of the Word 85 The Creature Known as Michael Rosen 87 Namaste Mr Lear 89 My Little Guy, Says Edith Fawkes 90 Monsieur Voltaire Commits a Faux Pas in 18th-century England 93 Glorious Uncertainty in de Bedroom 96 Bards in White Flannels 97 Bowdlerising the Bard 98 Viagra in Me Cocoa 100 Erasmus in England, 1499 103 The Fool’s Yule 104 In Your Hands The Plants Are Staying Put 109 This Thing Called Gardening 115 Weeds 117 The Plants Are Staying Put 118 Lewes to London Post-lockdown Casanova the Philosopher 123 Casanova the Philosopher

About the Author :

Poet, performer, anthologist, John AgardHe lives with the poet Grace Nichols and family in Sussex; they received the CLPE Poetry Award 2003 for their children's anthology Under the Moon and Over the Sea (Walker Books).

Review :
If Agard had not already been forged in the roller-coaster aftermath of empire, there would be an urgent need for society to invent someone like him. John Agard's first book since he finally won the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry is typically cosmopolitan, with one eye on the past and the other on the present...readers – especially schoolteachers and their pupils – tend to love his work… This thought-provoking, puckish, tender book will not disappoint them. In the year when we learnt of the damage and cruelty that the UK’s hostile-environment policies inflicted on the Windrush generation, John Agard strikes back with these cleverly crafted parables of an outsider. The little green man’s encounters and observations, his mix of wonder and wise caution, are given a voice that manages to be both naïve and incisive.