News for Babylon
News for Babylon: The Chatto Book of Westindian-British Poetry was a 1984 anthology of West Indian and black British poetry, edited by Jamaican poet James Berry and published in London by Chatto & Windus. The anthology included work by Wilson Harris, Faustin Charles, Rudolph Kizerman, Valerie Bloom, John Agard, Fred D'Aguiar, Samuel Selvon, E. A. Markham,[1] Grace Nichols, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Archie Pool and Benjamin Zephaniah. A Poetry Review reviewer commented on the way that the language seemed "to slip unselfconsciously from Creole to standard English between or within poems, creating a dialogue or polyphony of discourses in which the unequal encounter of two cultures is directly enacted."[2]
The anthology quickly sold out. Though never reissued, it "remains a standard text in educational institutions teaching colonial and post-colonial literature".[1]
References
- ^ a b David Dabydeen (2007). "News for Babylon". In David Dabydeen; John Gilmore; Cecily Jones (eds.). The Oxford Companion to Black British History. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-923894-1.
- ^ "News for Babylon" Poetry Review, Vol. 74, No. 2, 1984. Reprinted online here.