Midland

John Walker is a professor of Spanish at Queen’s University.

Kwame Dawes was born in Ghana, grew up in Jamaica, and now teaches
postcolonial literature at USC. The award-winning Midland, his sixth
poetry collection, is divided into four sections. Part 1 examines the
process of gathering memories and transforming them into poetry; the
amateur poet pilfers knowledge and wisdom gleaned from his dying
artist-poet father. The poet’s experiences in Britain are captured in
Part 2, which is dominated by the theme of mortality. “Cortиge on
Leyton High Road” reminds the poet of this cold, alien land where he
is determined not to die. The artistic rendering of sad themes is
explored in Part 3. “Marriage” is inspired by statues of Big Beaulah
(an apt patron of the poet’s Jamaican nation), while “Baptism” is
about carving life with stone. In “Grace,” the poverty of the
Jamaican people is ironically rendered through a meagre meal of
potatoes. Part 4 explores the experience of blacks in the American
South. Slavery and lynching are among the horrors chronicled in the
concluding nine-part cycle poem, “Midlands,” a powerful attack on
bigotry and intolerance.