Letters from the Black Ark

Rhythmic lyrical poems that embody black music, existence, and tragedy. The poems in this collection center on the word dub, which accrues a subtle lyrical connotation throughout its various forms and meaningsto bestow, vest, crown, and also to suspend, reverb, echo, and sever. Dub poetry plays with revealing and concealing, while also pointing the way to the conditions that produce black poetic music. In D.S. Marriotts poetry, tragic catastrophes of current black existenceLondon knife crime, the Windrush scandal, Grenfell, and deadly race violenceare portrayed as questions of language. To speak this language, as Marriotts poem show, is to take on the forces that cause rupture. Throughout these poems of loss, exile, and obliteration, the poet foresees his downfall and metamorphosis, ultimately realizing too late that he cannot transcend the reverberations and echoes laden with black social death.