Poor

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Femi performs at Mulberry’s ‘My Local’ Festive Event, November 2019. Photograph: David M Benett/Getty Images/Mulberry His two-year tenure as young people’s laureate coincided with one of London’s most horrifying urban design disasters, the Grenfell Tower fire. “In the future,” he writes, in a diary extract from the time, “every time I write grief on my phone its autocorrect asks if I mean Grenfell: have I written Grenfell so many times that it has registered it as a familiar word, or is this how collective mourning works?” Chosen as a Book of the Year by New Statesman, Financial Times, Guardian, Observer, Rough Trade and the BBC

This review is a case of tough love (see * at the end of the review), but I think I am being fair. The issues here, for me, are those typical of a young debut author — inconsistency. so, so many gems here. it's not quite no-skips for me but it's close. the photography throughout as well, gorgeous. For someone who loved Yeats and Pope and had discovered a reflection of his own experience in TS Eliot’s descriptions of Margate in The Waste Land, it was a bitter disappointment. “It was such a rigid curriculum. I didn’t have the best experience of school growing up, but there was still space for your imagination and your individualism to at least stretch its legs a little bit.” Caleb Femi (born 1990) is a British-Nigerian author, film-maker, photographer, and former young people's laureate for London. His debut poetry collection, Poor, was awarded a Forward Prize for Poetry.But grim though the estate was, it fed his imagination in unexpected ways. When he was 10, a mysterious mural appeared on a wall. Nobody today can remember exactly what it looked like except that it radiated bright colours across the concrete, and became a gathering point for the community. “Every good thing that happened on the estate was slammed into conjunction with that mural,” he says. “It birthed so much beautiful folklore: there were stories of people running through walls, or turning into cats – because of that painting, everything that you would find in Harry Potter already existed on my estate before I even knew about the books.” Flood, Alison (3 October 2016). "Poet Caleb Femi named first young people's laureate for London". The Guardian . Retrieved 14 December 2020. For now his own space is a flat in Deptford, which he shares with a cat called Dennis Adeyemi. It’s a female cat, he volunteers, because he had originally intended to adopt a male but took pity on the runt of the litter and couldn’t be bothered to think up a new name. He is by nature self-contained and nomadic, in regular touch with, but not close to his family, tramping the city streets with a head full of plans, dreaming of the films he will make and the poems he will write. I've already mentioned one other poet, Anna Akhmatova, but this collection also reminded of something Ilya Kaminsky wrote in Deaf Republic: The problem is, most of the remaining poems were not as compelling to me (1-2*). It's strange to 'rate' a lived experience and a cultural history, but at one point we must, and for me it comes down to whether the language or ideas conveyed are gripping and thoughtful.

He had only properly met his parents less than a year earlier, because they had emigrated to London from Nigeria when he was a baby, leaving their children behind with a grandfather and an uncle until they had saved enough money to bring them over. Their circumstances were still difficult and he knows all about going to school hungry, he says. “Dinner time was when we ate.”

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From 2014 to 2016 Femi taught English at a secondary school in Tottenham. [2] In 2016 he was chosen as the first young people's laureate for London. [4] On 30 July 2020, he published his debut poetry collection, entitled Poor, [5] which won the Forward Prize's Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection in October 2021. [6] Filmography [ edit ] Femi is a film-maker and photographer as well as a poet, and he became London’s first young people’s laureate in 2016. Scattered through the text are his own photos, which range from happy family gatherings to police crime scenes, from the geometric spines of multi-storey staircases to near abstract plays of brilliant light, and shadowy portraits of youths in hoodies. Armitstead, Claire (30 October 2020). "Caleb Femi: 'Henceforth I'm solely preoccupied with being a merchant of joy' ". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 16 November 2020. At the time of writing this review I am in the 1% of GoodReads readers who have given this less than a 3* rating. So as a preface for this review it's worth keeping in mind my views are probably not reflective of the typical readership. However, in my defense, I do really enjoy reading poetry and lived in London for a few years, so I really did come to this thinking I'd enjoy it. once when there was no football to survive / the silence I told him I dreamt a prophecy / & began to prophesy every unescaped thing in his throat / things that made him afraid of him & me for knowing & / speaking it all out into the world when I no longer knew / what to say I coughed up a half-eaten eyeball & told him it / was just my hay fever playing up again.'