Poetry
Dread Beat an' Blood
Linton Kwesi Johnson · 1975
Synopsis
Poems in Jamaican Creole, made to be spoken, in which the chanted repetition of a few words, “dread”, “war”, “fire”, “blood”, carries the anguish, suffering and anger of Black people in Britain. “Five Nights of Bleeding”, dedicated to Leroy Harris, a young man killed by a knife wound at a party, runs in five stanzas through five real venues in London, beginning with Brixton, where violence smoulders around the sound systems and their clashes.
Context
The collection appeared in London in 1975 from Bogle-L'Ouverture, a house founded in 1969 by Jessica and Eric Huntley, in sixty-nine pages with an introduction by Andrew Salkey; it was its author's second book, after a first collection published by Race Today in 1974. Most of the poems were recorded in 1978 with Dennis Bovell for Virgin's Front Line label, under the name Poet and the Roots, on an album of the same title, and the meeting of Bovell's dub rhythms with the poet's monotone delivery is regarded as the birth of dub poetry.
Who it is for
Short poems in Creole, written to be spoken over a bass line; the 1978 recordings give their complete form.
Prizes and reception
Critics have noted its percussive alliteration and internal rhymes, which belied the idea of a dialect poetry without art.
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