by Sai Murray - £8.99 Peepal Tree Press Ltd (2013)
paperback
ISBN 13: 9781845232061 | ISBN 10: 1845232062
Sai Murray follows in the committed political footsteps of Gil Scott-Heron, Adrian Mitchell and Linton Kwesi Johnson, while delighting in the kind of punk wordplay that brought fame to John Cooper Clarke. His dramatic performances have earned him an enthusiastic audience, keen for poems that challenge both the status quo and the defeatist passivity that says nothing can change.
His poems make powerful connections between monopoly capitalism’s control of global commerce, the threats of the food industry to our health and the dangers presented by the planet’s increasingly fragile ecology. Yet Murray’s wit and joyful engagement with language make them lively, moving explorations of our contemporary world.
Murray’s poems range in theme from moving personal familial confessions to dramatic monologues in a variety of voices; from parodies of the language of the Red Tops to clichés of our political rulers; from Facebook’s trivialisations of human community to the cosmetic tourist gloss that obscures new forms of plantation and racism in the contemporary Caribbean. Sai Murray’s vision is far-reaching, but it has at its centre the desire to cauterise the deceits of language and to envision a world that has equality, liberty and fraternity in its bloodstream.
(Price & availability last checked: February 2020)
In booklists: Black and Asian Poets,
In categories: Poetry & Writing,
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