Border Zone

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. His ninth Bloodaxe collection, Border Zone, explores a far-reaching canvas of British/Caribbean transatlantic connections, sweeping across centuries and continents.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 144 pages
Publication date: 28 April 2022
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd

For the past forty years, John Agard has been expanding the boundaries of British poetry with his playful, ironic fables that subvert our expectations. His ninth Bloodaxe collection, Border Zone, delves into a vast expanse of British and Caribbean transatlantic connections, spanning centuries and continents. Agard's border territory encompasses a range of narratives, from the novella-like poem Love in a Sceptred Isle, which tells the romantic story of a photographer from Barbados, Victor, and a librarian from Wales, Rhiannon, with lyrical tenderness and thought-provoking wit, to Casanova the Philosopher, a sequence of sonnets in the voice of the legendary Venetian philosopher, who humorously observes 18th-century English customs in a tongue-in-cheek memoir and travelogue. This diverse collection showcases a harmonious blend of thought-provoking mischief, bawdy humor, and elegiac moments, alongside the sequence The Plants Are Staying Put, where the poet takes on the role of an overnight lockdown gardener, and calypso poems, where the Guyana-born winner of the Queens Gold Medal for Poetry assumes the persona of the 'poetsonian,' a term he coined in the 80s to pay tribute to the inventive lyrics of the calypsonian, a significant thread in Agard's varied, innovative, and often satirical poetic output.

Weight: 232g
Dimension: 214 x 138 x 19 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781780375885