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    Travel Light Travel Dark
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    Travel Light Travel Dark
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    Travel Light Travel Dark
    Ebook118 pages35 minutes

    Travel Light Travel Dark

    By John Agard

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    John Agard has been broadening the canvas of British poetry for the past 35 years with his mischievous, satirical fables which overturn all our expectations. And he has just received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry from Her Majesty the Queen. In this new symphonic collection, Travel Light Travel Dark, he casts his unique spin on the intermingling strands of British history, and leads us into metaphysical and political waters. Cross-cultural connections are played out in a variety of voices and cadences. Prospero and Caliban have a cricket match encounter, recounted in calypso-inspired rhythms, and in the long poem, Water Music of a Different Kind, the incantatory orchestration of the Atlantic's middle passage becomes a moving counterpoint to Handel's Water Music. Travel Light Travel Dark brings a mythic dimension to the contemporary and opens with a meditation on the enigma of colour. Water often appears as a metaphoric riff within the fabric of the collection, as sugar cane tells its own story in 'Sugar Cane's Saga' and water speaks for itself in a witty debate with wine, inspired by the satirical tradition of the goliards, wandering cleri of the Middle Ages. Winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, 2012.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloodaxe Books
    Release dateMar 27, 2014
    ISBN9781780370736
    Unavailable
    Travel Light Travel Dark
    Author

    John Agard

    John Agard is a poet, performer, and anthologist. Born in Guyana, he moved to Britain in 1977. John was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry and lives in Lewes.

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    • 4/5
      John Agard is a poet who always has a sense of fun tucked away somewhere in the background of his work, even when he's dealing with serious subjects, and he particularly enjoys bringing apparently incongruous ideas together. There's a lot of this in Travel light, travel dark - Handel's Water Music takes on the slave trade, a racist Saxon complains in a pub about Norse immigrants, Old Father Thames contemplates a sex-change, and so on. I particularly liked "Prospero Caliban Cricket", an hommage to C.L.R. James, in which he puts new life into the most overworked postcolonial literary allusion with a calypso-style cricket commentary:Caliban arcing de balllike an unpredictable whipProspero foot it like chain to de ground.Before he could mek a movede ball gone thru to de slip.