A Return to the Lyric in Contemporary British Poetry

• culture populaire
• écriture des minorités
• musique et poésie
• poésie britannique contemporaine
• poésie lyrique

Abstract

This article tries to give an outline of the major characteristics of a recent trend in British poetry that I call a ‘return to the lyric’. Following on from the political and poetic deregulation in the late twentieth century United Kingdom, Fiona Sampson has noted a trend towards lyrical writing in new forms. Here, I note the importance of lyric poetry for marginalised writers (BAME, disabled, as well as women and queer writers), in particular Caleb Femi, Raymond Antrobus and Liz Berry, in order to express their affective experiences, which are also political. Through this new lyricism, these poets inscribe themselves in British literary traditions, notably with a rewriting of pastoral poetry, as well as in international traditions, whether this be via Greek mythology or hip-hop.

Plan

1The poetic deregulation of the 1980s, ’90s and early 2000s saw a diversification and opening up of poetic forms, what was considered ‘poetry’ or ‘poetic language’ and who could write or perform it, accompanied by the development of distinct schools and movements, some of which re-established certain formalisms and experimentations in opposition to this. However, taking up the trends observed by Fiona Sampson in the final chapters of Beyond the Lyric: A Map of Contemporary British Poetry, I argue that there has been a continuity of, or even a return to the lyric in recent British poetry, along specific contemporary lines.

2The lyric, which in its modern European forms, is an intersubjective mode of communication rooted in a relation to the world through life experiences, society, place, as well as large philosophical, emotional and socio-political questions, has seen a resurgence as a means of expression for minority and marginalised voices. The alignment with and influence of minority poets, writers, and other performers (including rappers and musicians) from the USA and beyond has continued to contribute to poetic trends, taking on a new dimension in the age of instapoets and other online forms of distribution. It is also important to note the crossover with music in the context of lyrical writing, whose very name comes from its association with the lyre. This has allowed for the creation of transnational influences, trends and poetic and political solidarities; however British poets rework lyrical traditions in specifically British ways today. Many of the writers working with the lyric tradition come from marginalised, excluded or minority backgrounds in some way, expressing felt and lived experiences in new lyrical ways, against dominant discourses and outside of strict genre distinctions and a trend towards the impersonal in certain schools and styles of poetic address. Whilst it is important to pay attention to the socio-political and cultural elements specific to historically marginalised writers, which are often specifically addressed in their poetry, this study of recent lyrical writing tries to bridge a gap. The aim of this paper is to underline the socio-political aspects present in this poetry, and in lyrical writing specifically by marginalised writers – women and minorities – without taking different demographic and sociological categories as ways of classifying and understanding their poetry, but rather considering the work of these writers together, as part of a specific poetic moment or movements.

• 1 “The principal object, then, proposed in the...

3I believe that the continued or resurgent popularity of lyric poetry draws on the tonality’s capacity for powerful intersubjective communication of affects through inventive use of language, foregrounding felt experience. The transformative power of its often highly inventive figurative language and imagery combined with the musicality and rhythmic elements allow writers to use the lyric to express and convey alternative visions and perspectives. As such, the tonality has been taken up by minority subjects in numerous countries and cultures to express themselves outside and against dominant literary trends, establishments, and national traditions, and as such to allow for poetic reimaginations of marginalised and/or vilified peoples, places and other elements of cultural, society and landscape. The role of lyricism not just as an exalted expression of feelings but as an intersubjective relationship grounded in real-life experience was of course foregrounded by Wordsworth in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,1 and the importance of first-person expression has often been commented upon: in the contemporary British context, this element is highlighted by Romana Huk, who states that the “lyric, in the general sense of being ‘the genre of personal expression’, as Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins describe it in The Lyric Theory Reader, has always been crucial to raced poetry in the UK because it queries that tacit collation of the personal and universal” (Huk 225). As such, a continuity emerges in the aims and content of lyric writing, despite the different context and specificities of subject matter, between the Romantics at the turn of the nineteenth century and minority poets today.

4This article looks at a range of this new lyric writing. It starts with a focus on the work of Caleb Femi, whose 2021 collection, Poor, combines imaginative and often lyrical rewriting of the experience of life on North Peckham council estate and more broadly the experience of young black men in the UK, with art photography images of the estate and its inhabitants (recalling the work of Claudia Rankine, amongst others. It also looks at the work of Raymond Antrobus, particularly poems from the collection The Perseverance, which offer transformative rewritings of British society and childhood through Antrobus’ experience as a deaf person and a white-passing mixed-race man. The final poet I focus on is Liz Berry, whose innovative lyrical writing reimagines the post-industrial Black Country in mythologised and post-Romantic ways, whilst also rewriting the experience of adolescence and young adulthood as a woman. The closing section of this article expands beyond the work of these poets to highlight some examples of the importance of lyrical transformations from marginalised or minority perspectives in the work of other writers, such as Kae Tempest or Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, and places this lyrical writing within broader British and international poetry trends.

5In Beyond the Lyric, Sampson describes the “arbitrary relationship between words and the world they’re supposed to describe” in what she names the “exploded lyric” (Sampson 259). I would not go quite so far in terms of the writers whose work this paper examines. The expression of a relationship to the world – both in its broadest sense, and often in terms of specific locales in which the poets live or have lived – is key to many of these poems. Rather than the language (including rhythm and sonic elements) – as well as sometimes the visual elements of the poetry – having an arbitrary relationship to the world, I would suggest something more akin to an inconstant or unexpected relationship, a suggestive use of language that opens up, reimagines, and demands an engaged or active reading or listening. There is a gap between denotation and expression where lyrical imagery plays and transforms in the works of these poets. As such, if a definition is useful, these writers could perhaps be positioned somewhere between Sampson’s expanded and exploded lyrics, although none of them are necessarily formally radical or radically abstract, though they are critical and reactive. They nonetheless represent a twenty-first century take on lyrical writing both in terms of language and subject matter. This is true even though some of their most obvious influences and references are in Romantic poetry and the Ancient Greek tradition, which they rework, building on the poetic deregulation of the past decades. Some writers reworking the lyric today could also be seen as overlapping with other schools of poetry that Sampson describes, notably the ‘anecdotalists’, whose simple personal style grounded in lived experience is often also key to the appeal and intersubjective nature of contemporary minority lyric poets.

Caleb Femi’s Peckham Pastoral

6Nigerian-born South London poet Caleb Femi’s collection Poor, which received the 2021 Forward Poetry Prize for best first collection, depicts with grace and delicate beauty the lives of poor black boys of a Peckham council estate. Written in a mixture of ‘street’ or Multicultural London English and elevated metaphor, often turning one register or tone into the other, Poor asks the reader to reconsider the potential of different kinds of English. This is of course now part of an established movement or even tradition, part of the deregulation that included the increasing prominence of both regional voices and postcolonial varieties of English, ranging from Grace Nichols’ Guyanese English to Tony Harrison’s Yorkshire vowels and beyond, in their various ways.

7Femi calls out to the reader from the first line of the collection, “Give me your face/& I’ll give you mine”, creating a dialogue, a connection with the reader, who is projected as wealthier, with a “holiday home in Costa Blanca” (Femi 3), a nod to the association of poetry and even book-buying with a certain social class or at least level of financial comfort. The poem – and collection – proceeds to present an area of London considered bleak with a mixture of interrogation (for example, envisaging dialogues between the architects and later residents, for example) and lyrical exaltation. This exaltation, apparent in lines like “the steely chic of my block”, which gives both strength and lustre through the word steel replacing the stereotypical ‘grey’ and also asserts its socio-cultural value through the word “chic”. The line also continues the assonances of /ɪ/ and /iː/ from the semantically contrasted previous line (“your pristine family tree”). As such, it creates an equality between the projected middle- or upper-class white reader and the poor, black speaker of the poem, and thus valorises this deprived, vilified council estate and the demographics associated with it. Here and elsewhere, Femi associates not only unexpected images but also a range of positive affects which demand a reconsideration of the affective literary and physical landscape of the country.

8A little further on in Poor, ‘Because of the Times’ juxtaposes the municipal vision for his housing estate with his own experiences:

Brown and gold and stretched like the slurring
of a toothless drunk [...]
A paradise of affordable bricks, tucked under
a blanket, shielded from the wind (Femi 13)

9This is not the fearsome, dilapidated place of cliché but a place of warmth, certainly problematic, but with its own beauty: it is home. Affordable, so often a euphemism for low-quality or unappealing, is re-imagined as the “paradise” for its denizens that the municipal vision had first proposed. Long syllables mark the trochees of the first line (brown/gold/stretched), creating a languorous, easy rhythm (which elsewhere is close to iambic pentameter, but with various irregularities). This rhythm is embodied by the word “stretched” and stresses value, even beauty, through the “gold”: neither depressive nor tense and frenetic. The juxtaposition of “a paradise” and “a blanket” at the head of subsequent lines associates the two in a notion of what home can, should and does here represent, lyrically reimagining the council estate as something approaching a new British idyll. This idyll is seemingly far removed from the bucolic villages and valleys that a cursory reading of the canon – particularly the Romantic poets, whose lyricism remains prominent in the national psyche – together with the cultural imaginary which it has nourished, would promote as an ideal home. Of course, it is important to note that not all British Romantic poetry presented the Anglo-British landscape as pastoral idyll for solitary reflection, and that many poems and poets paid a closer attention to the interworking of human and nonhuman, rural and urban, than the general cultural imaginary would permit: as Kate Rigby points out in her recent study, Reclaiming Romanticism, “Romanticism, understood as a defined ‘movement’, does not exist outside of the pages of literary historiography” (Rigby 2).

10This lyricism reimagines this part of the British landscape, whilst creating subjective voices for the vilified young black men that inhabit it, describing them in terms of magic and mysticism. In Femi’s collection, this is augmented by the inclusion of aestheticized photography of the estate and its inhabitants, offering a visual component to the elevation of these subjects to the status of art, revealing an oft-ignored beauty.

11Nonetheless, the real social problems are not ignored or aestheticized away: rather, Femi proposes solutions in part through this lyrical revalorisation. The solution for alienated poor boys is to “put them in the room of spirit and slow time”, in the poem bearing this title, and referencing the manga, Dragon Ball, and the possibility of temporarily escaping from reality. Made up of fifteen split-lines, all starting with the anaphora “boys who”, ‘Put Them in the Room of Spirit & Slow Time’ reimagines the experience of young black boys on the North Peckham Estate from an inside point of view through ‘street’ English and popular culture (here, notably manga), with lyricism. For example:

Boys who know roadside sun
            & know where to find fruiting lamp posts. […]
Boys who look to polar bears for lessons
            on how to grow white fur on black skin. […]
Boys who stopped waiting for a spirit in a holy place
            & stopped breaking for morning. (Femi 10-11)

12These lines show three of the major techniques of Femi’s work: the first transforms the harsh urban environment into a continuity of the (imagined) bucolic English country landscape, with an idyllic tone set through the “sun” and the season of fruit. The second line quoted here again harnesses imagery from the natural world to question who is a threat to whom, and to interrogate the racial dynamics and expectations placed upon black boys. The third brings in magic and religion in order to write a mythological, spiritual element into their experience whilst displaying the despair that comes from the double marginalisation of being both black and poor. The mythological elements is underlined by the anaphora and the regular structure with the split-line caesurae, positioning Femi as a bard for the boys of North Peckham and giving a certain musicality to an unrhymed poem whose metre is not constant, thus formally and sonically embodying the mixture of lyricism and everyday language that serves to reinterrogate the life experiences and sense of place that the poem presents. As such, rather than an escape from reality that the title would suggest, Femi’s poem reimagines the reality of these “boys” and offers an alternative, potentially valorising vision of their home and lives, between manga adventure and a new, urban pastoral. Femi’s poetry is not the first example of such reclaiming and rewriting of the pastoral in recent literature: Deborah Lilley evokes attempts to redefine new pastoral writing but argues that we could read them “more simply: as the newest development in a form that is shaped by the concerns of its time of writing” (Lilley 7), including the breakdown of the urban/rural divide (which she examines in relation to recent novelistic pastoral writing), and insisting on the role of the pastoral to offer “a means of orientation: of relatively mapping places, times, expectations, and responses according to its familiar patterns of space and thought” (Lilley 2).

13The development of imagery from the natural world, sometimes with pastoral undertones, runs through Poor, breaking down a traditional urban-rural divide (in which ethnic minorities are usually ascribed to the urban). For example, ‘Concrete (I)’ plays on the material of its title redescribe the estate as:

the valley of days
low yielding in laughs when the grey of
the concrete is louder than your outfit (Femi 19)

14This image is at once radically contemporary and localised, while recalling English pastoral descriptions and demonstrating that each place, each life and experience can be given equal weight and dignity, seen on its own merits. It offers a transformation of urban colours and clothing that creates resonances for the reader that can change perspective on both what and who are worthy or appropriate subjects for this kind of poetic treatment, an alignment with more traditional, rural, Romantic image of England. It becomes increasingly plausible to place much of Poor within the English tradition of poetic expression of a human-nature continuum, and the North Peckham estate and its inhabitants as a part of this pastoral order.

15The transformative power of Femi’s mixture of lyrical imagery, everyday street language and the context both of North Peckham and both real and symbolic ideas about poor black boys is developed perhaps most emblematically in ‘Boys in Hoodies’:

The inside of a hoodie is a veiled nook where a boy pours himself
into a single drop of rain to feed a forest. Each tree grateful for the
wet boy, unaware that the outside world sees this boy as a chainsaw.

Have you heard the canned laughter of a chainsaw? Don't listen for it
in forests, amid the ankles of trees, or the tongue of dried leaf.

Listen in the vibration of pavements when the concrete is wax,
outside of a Morley's where one chainsaw says to the other
'member that time when
                                     (gas)
              (gas)
                                     and the money was in his socks?

Then a rip of laughter erupts like the chugger of iron
                                        or heavy rain
                                        erupts –

and nearby trees brace for death or life. (Femi 48)

16Here the boys are “veiled nook[s] where a boy pours himself into a single drop of rain to feed a forest”, transforming the simple item of clothing that has inspired so much fear and disdain. The poem explicitly foregrounds commonly held views of “boys in hoodies” with the line, “the outside world sees this boy as a chainsaw.” Before going on to address the reader directly, questioning where a rare transformative experience, the laughter of a chainsaw would take place, and switching the site of lyrical poetry from the forest to a pavement “outside of a Morley’s”. The poem’s varied rhythms (Femi’s poems range from strict metrical formality to free verse) start with three lines of prose that evoke lyrical storytelling, before offering a partial echo of the experience of listening to boys in hoodies, remaining impenetrable but allowing their voices to be heard within the poem before it switches back to a lyrical register with the laughter that softens the “chainsaws” that these boys represent in the eyes of others. The final line, delayed, is not the eruption that the line before would suggest but a contemplation, returning to the trees as imagery, and questioning through an inversion of the standard word order (life or death) whether these boys are in fact a threat or a life source.

Raymond Antrobus: Surpassing Normative Standards through Lyricism

17Lyric poetry and other forms of expression are not only transformative of or for those who are ethnically or economically marginalised. Raymond Antrobus’ poetry deals with questions around his mixed racial identity, but he also speaks in transformative, valorising ways – and does so orally – of his experience as a deaf person. He evokes for example the rich yet overwhelming first experience of sounds in ‘The First Time I Wore Hearing Aids’. The experience of hearing differently is shared with readers in ‘Echo’, whose different sections are entitled in sign language, making his mode of expression known in, and enter into, written English, a device he uses in numerous poems. Deaf experience and different hearing are also underlined through the use of sonic effects such as assonance, alliteration and other forms of consonance which create a specific musicality: “blaring birds, constant crumbs/of dull doorbells, sounds swamped” and numerous mythological references for his experience (including of course, Echo):

My ear amps whistle as if singing
to Echo, Goddess of Noise,
the ravelled knot of tongues,
of blaring birds, consonant crumbs,
of dull doorbells, sounds swamped,
in my misty hearing aid tubes. (Antrobus 13)

18This transformation of deaf experience is powerful because it brings musicality to a way of being associated with absence of sound, and by extension music. Its power also comes – as for Femi – from the way in which it transforms a kind of lived experience that is often viewed negatively (perhaps here with pity rather than vilification) into something mythological and spiritual. The acknowledgement of the role of sound in human arts and religion rather than limiting Antrobus’ scope is transformed through an inverted rhetorical question and that encourages the reader to question their own relationship to both sound and to sacralisation. In the end, Antrobus lives in a “palace” and his language is visual, the pulsating light of the doorbell an everyday counterpoint to Echo and the Sagrada Familia (“Gaudí believed in holy sound/and built a cathedral to contain it”, Ibid.). He gives an affirmation: “I am able to answer,” which bookends this first verse, which started with the comparison of his hearing aid’s whistle to singing and as such aligning it with the lyrical tradition of transformative, musical expression of personal experience. Moreover, Antrobus not only uses the first person to refer to his own experience but brings in the reader (or audience), through the notion of an answer. The poem itself concludes with the happy silence Antrobus experiences as a child when his grandfather preaches: all he hears are “Babylon’s babbling echoes” (Ibid. 18) in a turn of phrase that has a clear alliterative musicality, defying expectations of deafness. It also offers a critique of religious doxa whilst aligning himself with ‘Babylon’. As a result, it brings up the Rastafarian tradition that his Jamaican father was part of, thus linking multiple parts of his identity.

19Elsewhere, in ‘Dear Hearing World,’ Antrobus reverses the experience of incomprehension, in reference to sign language, saying “I want these ghosts to haunt your tongue-tied hands” (Antrobus 37); as he reinscribes the deaf voices that “go missing like sound in space” (Ibid. 38). Lyrical language transforms and shares experiences, gives new perspectives, involves readers and listeners, here through the use of a second person to invoke the haunting. It should thus come as no surprise that the lyrical mode is preferred by minority writers to reach out: “Take your God back, though his songs/are beautiful, they are not loud enough” (Ibid. 36). The ambiguous nature of what God represents here (spoken language, a Christian God?) questions doxa and pushes for a reconsideration of music, and of praise music and its enunciation. The language of ‘Dear Hearing World’ is most lyrical in the first and last stanzas, whilst the middle stanzas describe through a mixture of personal experience and fact the lived impact of people’s political and perhaps unknowing decisions to shut out the deaf community. Antrobus announces his personal reaction as a result, in the sibilant first lines:

I have left Earth in search of sounder orbits,
a solar system where the space between
a star and a planet isn’t empty. (Ibid. 36)

20The extended metaphor of space elevates Antrobus’ deaf experience beyond the confines of the hearing world, and is (like the “steely chic” of Femi’s estate) a source of strength, shown through the pun of “sounder orbits”. This message is bookended with the final two lines: “Deaf voices go missing like sound in space/and I have left earth to find them” (Ibid. 38). Through the opening and closing of the poem, Antrobus positions himself as a voice for the deaf community and the poem does the metaphorical and literal work of reinscribing their experience and needs in relation to the hearing world. At the same time, through the figure of space exploration, the poem expresses that the hearing world, here synonymous with the planet earth, is in itself limited and only one of many places and life experiences in the vastness of the universe, challenging the reader to question the supposed universality, or normative standard, of their experience, and even their understanding of poetry, sound and musicality.

21This mixture of specific, and often harsh, factual explication of lived experience and the transformative possibilities proposed through lyrical language is used by Antrobus not only in relation to his deafness. As a white-passing (or at least not black-appearing) mixed-race man, he has been excluded both by the British white and black communities and several of his poems also deal with this. For example, in ‘Ode to My Hair,’ the blunt language, which Antrobus is on the receiving end of, is contrasted with his affective reaction which is described with the imagery of wheat and strings, growing and natural like his hair:

When a black woman
with straightened hair
looks at you, says

nothing black about you,
do you rise like wild wheat
or a dark field of frightened strings? (Antrobus 27)

22This hair, which he later tries to grow into a “wildness” to replicate his Father’s, is shown to have an authentic value in contrast with the implicit critique of his interlocutor’s straightened hair. The imagery of the “wild heat” and “dark field” – implying his ‘black half’ – are personified, creating an ambiguity: is this Antrobus himself, or does it refer to his hair? The deeply emotional nature of a relationship to both hair and heritage, particularly to someone of African-descent is thus foregrounded both through imagery and through long vowels (particularly the three /aɪ/ of “rise like wild”) that give a rhythm to this response, in contrast with the blunt, non-lyrical language addressed to him. Nonetheless the poem does not offer a clear resolution, embodying Antrobus’ white-passing privilege and his inability to fit into the image he has of himself in light of his Father (“trying to be my father’s ’fro”, Ibid. 28) and his mixed identity. However, it is in both instances the experience of alterity, of being marginalised, excluded or vilified that is transformed and valorised through lyrical language in Antrobus’ work.

Liz Berry, Bard of the Black Country

23Whilst women’s voices in British poetry are certainly nothing new, as Sampson has noted, there has been a rise in prominence of women writers since the 1980s. Amongst other poets, the importance of women’s voices in contemporary British lyric poetry is maintained by Liz Berry, whose use of Black Country dialect and foregrounding of questions of maternal experience (in ‘The Republic of Motherhood’) continue to diversify the national poetic landscape whilst transforming the intensely personal with a richly affective lyrical style of writing. This often takes shape through the use of birds and other animals as figures and conceits and by expressing a proximity to the landscape that recalls the Romantic poets. In this way, Berry reimagines the industrial urban and peri-urban world of the West Midlands as a site of anchorage for identity and a place of beauty, while linking them to a mythological lineage. This is perhaps most obviously enacted in the title poem of the collection, Black Country:

Commuters saw it first, vast
on the hillside by the A41,
a wingless Pegasus, hooves
kicking road into the distance. (Berry 6)

24Here the ordinary, banal setting of an A-road commute is immediately brought into relief with a magical figure that also evokes movement, creating a mythological continuity that elevates the moment of daily transport. The consonances: “first, vast” and “Pegasus, hooves” with their comma-caesura break the sentence rhythm that could have been created through enjambment. Berry creates pauses and a parallel rhythmic structure, which draw attention to details of language in the image of Pegasus. It later becomes clear that this Pegasus is a part of the physical scenery, and the use of the mythological figure transforms the mining history of the Black Country, giving it a mythological status, a place in literary tradition worthy of its importance in local cultural imaginary. Pegasus is of course a symbol of flight, of an animal given capacities beyond those usually expected, akin to numerous other images in Berry’s poems. These images transform her own experience and her local idea through lyrical association with mythology and as a part of a wider human-natural system, somewhere between the pastoral and the georgic imaginaries, with a particular importance given to birds.

but when they examined its flanks
they found pure coal,

coal where none had been mined
in years, where houses
still collapsed into empty shafts
and hills bore scars. (Ibid. 6)

25This “gift from the underworld” evokes the coal that was in its time a gift to the people of the area, reflected in the nostalgic men who at the sight of Pegasus have “faces streaked with tears” (Ibid. 7). The stark beauty of the imagery and the affective force of the poem elevate working class Black Country life and its landscape to a romanticised, mythological status and in a way analogous to Femi’s work, force a reconsideration of what belongs in the poetic tradition, and of who creates and holds what status in British cultural imaginary.

26The mixture of succinct, almost terse, use of language and dialect, and the transformative lyric power of specific metaphors to question personal (and gendered) experience are perhaps most clearly displayed in Black Country’s opening poem, ‘Bird’:

When I became a bird, Lord, nothing could not stop me.

               The air feathered
                                          as I knelt
by my open window for the charm –
                                          black on gold,
                                     last star of the dawn.
[…]
I found my bones hollowing to slender pipes,
             my shoulder blades tufting down.
                         I spread             my flight-greedy arms...
[…]
silence

             then an exultation of larks filled the clouds
and, in my mother’s voice, chorused:

      Tek flight, chick, goo far fer the winter. (Berry 1)

• 2 I do not of course wish to suggest that Berr...

27Whilst the lines are short and the choices of words seemingly simple, their connotations are liberating and capacious. The irregular line lengths and sparse presentation of the poem on the page (which I have attempted to recreate as closely as possible here) echo the hollowing language and feathering form of its metaphor, as well as breaking up sound patterns into ‘tweets’, into light breathy sentences, swoops and swishes. The transformative nature of the language is underlined by the image of an “exultation of larks”: by becoming a lark, Berry exalts her Black Country heritage and the language in dialect quoted from her mother two lines later enters into the music and song of the poetry, as does the double negative of the first line, boldly positioned as the opening of a collection against the constraints of standardised English.2 Just as Antrobus reclaims song and sound patterns for the deaf, here Berry exalts her mother’s black country tones as birdsong. Written in the first person, becoming a bird is an act of liberation of English lyrical poetry just as it is for Berry’s expression of personal, gendered experience.

28Later, ‘Bird’ goes on to say, “they lifted me up from Wren’s Nest” (Ibid. 2), cleverly combining a real landmark in Dudley with the subject’s ornithological transformation, underlining her link to and exaltation of the derided industrial Midlands landscape. She then passes over landmarks and people from her childhood, underscoring the link to adolescent transformation and the metaphor of “flying the nest” upon reaching adulthood. The poem’s final line, “I raised my throat to the wind/and this is what I sang...”, leaves the subject within the conceit and positions her as bard of female Black Country experience, introducing the rest of the collection.

29The figure of the bird as point of identification and liberating transformation of identity recurs in numerous poems from Berry’s collection. The opening of ‘Owl’, for instance, recalls Romantic lyricism, perhaps a Coleridge conversation poem such as ‘Frost at Midnight:’ “My body wakes with the constellations, star-by-star in the stifling darkness...” (Ibid. 30). Again, Berry’s experience is embodied, and yet works through transformative metaphors; whilst ‘Owl’ deals with the experience of grief, it does not specifically work with the Midlands landscape or dialect, nor does it refer to gendered experiences in obvious ways. However, it tends towards a blurring of human and non-human language and experience, integrating lines like “hoot-hoo-hoo-buhuhu-hoo” and references “shape-shifters” directly. The final stanza highlights the persistent power of lyric poetry:

A fury, I plunged through the sultry blackness,
over children with bows, to seek my love,
his pitiful heart face, the shape of sorrow. (Ibid. 30)

30The speaker, both bird and mythological creature, expresses grief which here becomes a sensual experience, with parallel rhythmic patterns in the four clauses of the final two lines, steps of the fury’s descent, linked by the internal half-rhyme of ‘bows’ with ‘sorrow’. This first-person expression of strong feeling becomes tangible to the reader at the same time as it is inscribed in multiple lyrical traditions – from ancient Greece to post-Romantic England.

Kae Tempest, Manzoor-Khan and the broadening scope of lyricism in the UK and beyond

31Through my analyses of some of Femi’s, Antrobus’ and Berry’s poetry, I aim to show the breadth of new forms of lyricism in Britain today. Nonetheless, they represent only tips of so many icebergs. It would be hard to discuss contemporary lyrical voices in British poetry without mentioning Kae Tempest, whose albums of spoken word poetry have been released to critical acclaim and popular success, and who has even performed at Glastonbury. Combining personal felt experience, local life and socio-political commentary, their work has increasingly included an exploration of queer experience as well as a general interest in minority and excluded groups and individuals. Tempest does this with a voice that expands to speak about broader national social and cultural questions in intimate ways, as well as transforming personal experience and emotions through the reworking of mythology and the use of vivid and sometimes lyrical language, combining first-person storytelling and the power of precise and transformative evocation of moments and feelings. On the one hand harsh realities of life and socio-political commentary are placed side by side with humour and lyricism in poems such as ‘People’s Faces’:

It's coming to pass, my country's coming apart
The whole thing's becoming such a bumbling farce
Was that a pivotal historical moment we just went stumbling past?
Well, here we are, dancing in the rumbling dark
So come a little closer, give me something to grasp
Give me your beautiful, crumbling heart (Tempest 2019, 0m09s)

32As the last line from this quotation hints, Tempest is speaking on an intimate level: is this to the listener, the audience, or to a lover? We are brought into their inner world just as we are led to question the state of the country. In other poems the details of relationships and romance are also brought out with a distinctly twenty-first century lyrical touch, such as here in ‘Firesmoke’:

My visionary is a vision
I watch her dancing by the window
And it rips my flesh to ribbons
And the whole world is just ripples
In the middle distance [...]

Explosives have nothing compared to these sparks
So let's fall apart
And then lie with me, breathing in the den of the dark
It's firesmoke (Tempest 2019, 0m07s)

33Here half-rhymes, alliteration, sibilance, and assonance link together ideas and images in verse that is set to music, with an intimate, loving violence that conveys strength of personal experience. In more recent work, such as ‘Salt Coast’, Tempest combines these two personal and socio-political tendencies in their work, with carefully chosen words to evoke the island of Britain in tender, evocative ways juxtaposed with purposefully hyper-ordinary elements of daily life and social injustice. The intimate knowledge and tender word choices place the poet in a direct even romantic relationship with landscape and country:

Beneath the orderly queues, the bad moods, the nice views
The have-nots and have-twos, the night shifts in flat shoes
The discarded masks, the empty tubes [...]

You got out from underneath the weight of suffer and obey
The tyranny and hate of Britannia rules the waves
And now you swing your hips as you go strutting down the lane

I love you when I see you this plain

Your salt coast, your foul wind
Your old ghosts, your scrap tin
The browning of your leaves
And the greening of your rain (Tempest 2022, 1m31s)

34Beyond what could be clearly defined as lyric poetry proper, the appeal and force of the lyric extends into other forms of poetic writing in the UK and beyond. Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, slam poet and political activist writer whose ‘This is not a humanising poem’ gained her the runner-up spot at the 2017 Last Word national poetry slam final at the Roundhouse in 2017, combines percussive hip-hop inflected use of consonants and flow to conveys political points with rhythm, wit and a sometimes-lyrical engagement with the personal everyday experiences. As such, her poems also draw on the ‘anecdotal’ trend, and she makes great use of the second person to directly engage her audience. The power of Manzoor-Khan’s poetry comes through the transformation of the affects of discrimination and marginalisation through a mixture ordinary, familiar language and moments of powerful, original imagery. For example, in ‘This Poem Is Not For You’, a refusal to perform an expected version of herself for what she names the ‘white gaze’, she cites micro-aggressions, describing one as:

that time you flashing-light siren whip-downed my door
cut out my tongue
and told me yours was better (Manzoor-Khan 12)

35The whip of course viscerally evokes pain – and possibly memories of slavery and indentured labour under the British Empire –, this pain is intensified by the cut tongue and the denominalised three-part verb that transforms the interlocutor, and by extension perhaps majority elements of society more generally, into a series of menacing objects to reflect the frequent sensations of pain and threat felt by marginalised people whose voices are often excluded from discourse, all of which is directed at an audience or reader via the use of the second person.

36It is also worth noting the increased lyrical elements and traces of orality in novel forms or book format by minority writers, perhaps most clearly and notably with the autofictional novel-in-verse Lara, by Bernardine Evaristo, but a ‘poetic’ organisation of meaning and moments of lyricism are also found in Girl, Woman, Other, with its use of line rather than punctuation, as well as some of its imagery. More lyrical rap music also engages with the UK’s hybrid postcolonial poetic traditions: on Loyle Carner’s recent album Hugo, for example, the rapper worked with John Agard to rework Agard’s seminal poem ‘Half Caste’ into a semi-lyrical musing on his own mixed identity in twenty-first century Britain. The rhythms and reliance on first-person expression lend rap a propensity to lyricism, which the imagery of rappers like Carner – or indeed Tempest, whose work is sometimes defined as rap – build upon, questioning the limits of distinctions between genres and forms.

37There are of course far more lines of reflection to explore within the current trend for lyrical writing, including the extent to which it can be seen as an emerging literature in its own right, and as a literature on a transnational level. Indeed, the crossover with hip-hop, and the prominence of a certain lyricism in much online poetry (‘Instapoetry’) are characteristics of contemporary poetry both within and beyond Britain. This brief examination of some of the different lyrical writers and performers in the UK aims to show how thinking about the lyric is a generative approach to the literary landscape, and building on Sampson’s definition of the “exploded lyric”, shows how this millennia-old tonality is being reworked in new, intersubjective ways, in light of both British poetic and international cultural developments.

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