Plays & Poetry

An uplifting poetry collection from the number one bestselling author of My Name Is Why, Lemn Sissay OBE

Something Dark tells the true story of Lemn Sissay who as a baby was given up by his Ethiopian mother in the 1960s. An autobiographical performance about Sissay's upbringing in a racist care system. Something Dark is now a set text on Edexcel's Contemporary Black British Literature: A Guide.

“In the early 1990s, in his volume The Bears And Other Poems, Knute Skinner embarked on an extraordinary poetic project – the elaboration of short poetic fictions. In the intervening years he has become a master of this charged and compelling form. These short poems are exquisitely compressed narratives delineating and exposing lives often within a relational context. The narrators are a diverse bunch: adulterers, deviants, adventurers, lovers, friends, whose utterances and scraps of dialogue frame the foibles, truths, frailties and enduring alliances between characters strewn across a variety of contexts. In some of the poems there is an undisclosed but implied secret that entreats the reader to return, to name what has been conflated and intuitively sussed, and to define the intriguingly elusive and alluring truth of the poem. There are very few books of poetry that you would run back into a burning building to retrieve. Make no mistake, An Upside Down World is one of them.”

Fiona Smith has created a beauty of a collection in A Lemming Year, a poetry of clarity and sharp descriptive power, yet a poetry charged with the emotions of attachment. Hers is a poetry of remembrance and reading, of love and bereavement, yet it is work imbued with craft and craftsmanship. Here is a unique poetic talent, writing in a clear style that may be relished and enjoyed, a poetry as unexpected as a Nordic cheese. — Thomas McCarthy