THE PENULTIMATE poem in Kei Miller's debut collection stopped me.
Sure, I had thoroughly enjoyed the striking images of the mostly short poems in 'Part One: Church Women' and 'Part Two: In Dream Country'.
I enjoyed as he reinterpreted the familiar in striking language (singing in church becomes "the chorus floats like newspaper/up to God's heaven where,/smiling, He adds it to his fold" in Off-Key I) and chuckled as The Bus Driver is Accused of not Wearing Uniform told the judge "bad bwoy never out of uniform;/always wear the same dirty merino/and cut up shorts, proving/that him come from nowhere/and answer to nobody".
But the second poem in 'Part Three: Rum Bar Stories' stopped me.
It reads:
"When the rum stretched itself
into an Atlantic and he
overboard and drowning
came up for breaths,
he never once shouted for help,
but told us instead of his naked wife spread-eagled
and whimpering under the buck of a huge black man;
he told us of his surprise blooming in the doorway,
how she opened her eyes and screamed; he told us how the man got up slowly,
erect, his testicles swinging,
and walked past him
like it was nothing."
The casual callousness, the beautiful brutality, the stark savagery of the earth-shattering moment, the nonchalance of the man doing the dirty, all graphically told, is stunning.
MATTERS OF FAITH
Matters of female faith are thoroughly explored in the first segment, Miller writing of moments in worship where "women will strip Britain/off their tongues" in Tongues I and describing a police night-time invasion with "the door collapsing /a confused woman holding her nightie/at the place where a sagging breast/would fall out" in Off-Key II.
I have seen "the woman who marches/around Kingston, bearing her banner/a stout witness: REPENT JESUS SOON COME" and he ends with Death ("the place too cold - it have too much light, too much quiet".
On the personal note in part two, Aquaphobia for his mother is touching as it ends "she gave her children Jesus-feet/to walk on top of waves", while Miller goes back to his childhood in On Arson and Parachutes to that awkward child-boy-wanna-be man stage where "One Valentine's when I was too young/and too old to say I love you".
EXCELLENT COLLECTION
He takes a wry look at the reaction to his locks with "some people fraid/of this continent growing in my head/they been walking from Africa/all these years/and I bring it too near" in The man after church... and sounds the ominous warning at the end of Psalm 151 that "if you draw knife onto God/then He will draw knife on to you".
The three-part A Who Sey Sammy Dead recalls the escape of Sammy the monkey from Hope Zoo in 2002 ("your death is not death,/only the separation of fur from spirit").
This Johncrow describes the confusion of a bird flying over Spanish Town bypass, sighting a crushed fellow crow and wondering "if such cannibalism/breaks the rules".
And Miller ends an excellent collection on an appropriate sad note as a drinker tells a companion "if someone ask/who the hell I talking with - /if I don't know is six years/you been dead now, Paul/I will hit the brute down - /for not knowing how spirit/and spirit is always talking".
Kingdom of Empty Bellies is published by Heaventree Press.
