Author Description

This collection is full of the sea and rain, blues and golds, rhythm and revolution. This is Lillian Allen's long-anticipated book of poems -- her first book since 1993. Collected here is a mix of poems, songs and poetic essays. Allen creates and examines a new poetic style, blending traditional poetry with her inimitable lyrical style, resulting in abstract poems with rhythmic movement that shout out to be read aloud. The book also charts Allen's range as a spoken word artist and poet. Known for her political poetry, Allen speaks of the condition of our society, from the Oklahoma bombing to a Toronto Rasta on trial to her own personal place as a black woman in this society. Her more personal poetry explores the journey of the African slave, as she strives to place herself in that ancestry in lyrical poems about her own pilgrimages to Jamaica and Newfoundland. Allen's work is concerned with language, both in the oral and the rhythmic sense, comparing Caribbean dialect to the lilt of the Newfoundland tongue, as well as exploring language manifests on the page. As Allen says, Poetry is dialogue between the world inside us and the world outside.