Close Readings

Jay Bernard’s 'Surge' and Kei Miller’s 'In Nearby Bushes', both published in 2019, address acts of violence whose victims were not directly known to the writers: in Surge, the deaths of thirteen Black teenagers in the New Cross Fire of 1981; in Miller’s poem, a series of rapes and murders in Jamaica. Both can be seen as collective elegies, interleaving newspaper and medical reports, and other archival documents, with more lyrical passages, and both can be read as comments on the state of the nation as well as personal expressions of desolation. While Bernard’s poem opens out into an investigation of radical Black history and the marginalisation of Black communities in London, Miller uses blanked-out newspaper items, among other techniques, to search for the ‘understory’, an experience beyond language, which is in turn connected to colonial, and pre-colonial, Jamaica. In this episode, Mark and Seamus consider the different ways these poets respond to the shocking events they depict, while also incorporating them into a broader poetic landscape.

Watch Jay Bernard reading from 'Surge' at the London Review Bookshop: https://youtu.be/XTZKYEimq2Y

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