News for Babylon

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News for Babylon: The Chatto Book of Westindian-British Poetry
News for Babylon.png
Editor James Berry
LanguageEnglish
Publisher Chatto & Windus
Publication date
1984;40 years ago (1984)
Publication placeUnited Kingdom
Pagesxxvii, 212
ISBN 9780701127961
OCLC 12721835

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]

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References

  1. 1 2 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.
  2. "News for Babylon" Poetry Review, Vol. 74, No. 2, 1984. Reprinted online here.