In the Jamaican poet Kei Miller’s second collection, published since his move to the UK, the first and strongest sequence, ‘In This New Country’, is a tribute to the strangeness of arriving in a Britain already colonised by Jamaicans ‘in reverse’ (the term is Louise Bennett’s): ‘Walking through Peckham / in London, West Moss Road in Manchester, / you pass green and yellow shops / where tie-headwomen bargain over the price / of dasheen’. Similar contradictions abound. The speaker, who is only a mediocre dancer back home, ‘can dance / dances that have fallen out / of season, like mangoes in February’ yet be adored as some exotic god: ‘in this country, you move like fire / amongst the cane, you move like sugar / and like ocean’. The collection is full of such haunting images, and as in the prolific Miller’s earlier books (the short stories in Fear of Stones and a previous collection of poems, Kingdom of Empty Bellies) the sacred and the profane commingle: ‘you say bomboclawt / softly, like a prayer’. Most shockingly, a whimsical rhapsody on the ‘revolutionary properties’ of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream suddenly plunges into darker terrain:

Rory’s story begins in New York
in a parlour that does not sell swirls
or double cones, one flavour atop another.
A sign at the door says: No Mixing!
And when he was in love with a black man
they went to this store and thought
the sign was for them -
that the owner was upset not because
they were gay, but because one was a nigger-lover,
and the other a nigger.

This ability to reveal seething and hybrid impulses beneath the mask of identity is Miller’s greatest strength in this poised, sardonic volume of poems. Though at times overly self-conscious, his writing shows that Caribbean poetry can move beyond the strictures of modernism without ghettoising itself into either the ‘black’ or ‘performance’ markets.