Second Place Rosette: Poems about Britain

Second Place Rosette is a calendar of the customs, rituals and practices that make up life in modern Britain. The poems take in maypole dancing, mehndi painting, and medical prescriptions. Some events, like the Jewish Sabbath, happen every week; some, like the putting away of Christmas decorations, thankfully come only once a year. The subjects range from the universal to the personal: every family might have its own ritual, and each culture its own important figures to remember and commemorate. In the introduction, co-editor Emma Wright notes how, as the daughter of a refugee, she felt ‘deeply disturbed by current discourse about Britishness and how it seems impossible to separate talk of national identity and pride from talk of exclusion and isolation.’ Against that divisive rhetoric, Wright and co-editor Richard O’Brien have assembled a refreshingly inclusive take on national identity. Poets from different cultural backgrounds speak to their sense of what Britain means through their own daily lived experience, through what they care about on a grass-roots level. The nation which emerges from the poems is a patchwork quilt of betting tips and TV dinners, nights out on Bold Street and strolls in the park. While the years pass, the seasons cycle, and the people who make up the country change, these poets reveal how much stays the same. In Britain, there will always be a man running late who really should have been allowed to get the bus, and a warm spot by the fire in a pub in December. Much of the book displays an ambivalence towards the land and its rituals, but there is also love, affection and pride. Mixed feelings: what could be more British than that?

About the Author :
Emma Dai'an Wright is a British-Chinese-Vietnamese publisher and illustrator. She worked in ebook production at Orion Publishing Group before leaving in 2012 to set up The Emma Press with the support of the Prince's Trust. She has since published over 500 writers across more than 130 books, including poetry anthologies for adults and children, short stories, and translations. She lives in Birmingham. Richard O’Brien is a poet, translator and academic based in Birmingham, UK.

Review :
'I’m not sure it is a response as much as a reminder of what this country is really about. Not the negative ideology, the have and have nots, the simmering hate or a nostalgia for something that never really existed; but a celebration of the huge melting pot of cultures, traditions and oddities that we all can relate to or recognise as being peculiarly British. Family, festivities, rainy days, cooking food, the seaside, bus rides and the pub. The book is more muddy fields and warming soup than it is ‘this green and pleasant land’, and it’s all the more comforting for it.' "I think the idea was to create an anthology with an inclusive sense of British identity, perhaps particularly with the feelings of divisiveness with Brexit. The book works its way through the year so you have a few poems for each month of the year and they’re all rituals or ceremonies, [whether] attached to a particular region or cultural group... Somebody described it as a patchwork quilt of Britain so all the differences are there but somehow we're all united." Louise Walker