Reggae Poet

A dance hall session in poetry, Wheel and Come Again takes readers into the heart of reggae, into the seduction of the drum and bass. The poems mix all the resources of language with the reggae mood. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

A biography in verse of reggae legend Bob Marley, exploring the influences that shaped his life and music on his journey from rural Jamaican childhood to international superstardom.

Before he was the face of reggae music and the most prominent practitioner of Rastafarian religion, Bob Marley was a little boy called Nesta, growing up in the tiny Jamaican village of Nine Miles. The only son of a Jamaican farmer's daughter and an aging British government official, the young boy was rejected by both white and black society, and tormented by gangs in the poor neighborhoods of Trench Town. Bob soon learned to find refuge and relief in American rock 'n' roll. He began making his own music, combining the popular music he heard on the radio with the sounds he heard around him throughout Jamaica. Bob formed a band called the Wailers. Eventually, their music made its way across the Atlantic. Before long, Bob was one of the most famous and influential musicians in the world, embarking on worldwide tours and releasing records embraced by the public and critics alike. But fame was not always easy, as Bob's rise to stardom strained his relationship with his wife, children, and even his childhood friends who had helped him achieve his dreams. He also found himself in the middle of a struggle for power in Jamaica, and found his life endangered by corrupt politicians and militias. But with his steadfast belief in the Rastafarian religion, and an unyielding focus on the creation of music, Bob Marley carried on, becoming one of the most beloved musicians of all time, with an influence that can still be felt today. Book jacket.

Since the 1970s, poet Linton Kwesi Johnson has been putting pen to paper to refute W.H. Auden’s claim that “poetry makes nothing happen.” For Johnson, only the second living poet to have been published in the Penguin Modern Classics series, writing has always been “a political act” and poetry “a cultural weapon.” In Dread Poetry and Freedom David Austin explores the themes of poetry, political consciousness, and social transformation through the prism of Johnson’s work. Drawing from the Bible, reggae and Rastafari, and surrealism, socialism, and feminism, and in dialogue with Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James and Walter Rodney, W.E.B. Du Bois and the poetry of d’bi young anitafrika, Johnson’s work becomes a crucial point of reflection on the meaning of freedom in this masterful and rich study.

When the guitars tickle a bedrock of drum and bass, when the girl a shock out and a steady hand curve round her sweat-smooth waist, when the smell of Charlie mingles with the chemicals of her hair and the groove is of the sweetest friction - how is a young man to keep his way pure? Kwame Dawes's poetry rises to new heights in these psalms of confession and celebrations of reggae's power to prophesy, to seek after righteousness and seduce the body and mind. Here is poetry walking the bassline, which darts sweetly around the rigid lick of the rhythm guitar yet expresses all the sadness and alienation at the heart of reggae. This, for Dawes, is the earth which 'never tells me my true home' and where behind every chekeh of the guitar there is the ancestral memory of the whip's crack. Shook Foil dramatises the conflict between the purity of essences and the taints of the actual, not least in the poems which focus on Bob Marley's life. Here is the rhygin, word-weaving prophet and the philanderer with the desperate hunger for yard pumpum, the revealer of truths and the buffalo soldier who has married yard with show biz affluence. Above all there is the intense sadness of Marley's death, for how can one live without the duppy conqueror's defiant wail in an island gone dark for the passing of his song? But for Shook Foil there is always the gospeller's hope that the dead will rise from dub ruins and patch a new quilt of sound for the feet to prance on. And when the high hat shimmering and the bass drum thumping, what else to do but dance?

Gale Researcher Guide for: Poetry in "Rotten English": Linton Kwesi Johnson is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.