At first glance, a collection which manically riffs on light and songs and songs of light doesn't seem terribly appealing. If, like me, you come to Kei Miller's collection with a similar preconception, the first few lines of the opening sequence Twelve Notes for a Light Song of Light may not engross you. We are told 'A light song of light is not sung/ in the light' and so it continues for eleven further short notes.
However, later it seems that this theme of light and song can work incredibly well. The 'Some Definitions for...' poems (definitions of song, night and three considerations of light) are in the vein of jerky Wikipedia style consciousness. Song, for example, is a common surname in Korea, a bankrupt low-cost airline, a bargain and 'any sound that escapes, also anything that escapes; a passage/ out, the fling up of hands'. The key word, like a term typed into a search engine, is merely a password to the possibilities inherent in meaning and language.
Light too functions as the antithesis of much of the darkness the poems let loose. A Smaller Song tells of the incredibly difficult and dangerous atmosphere for 'battybwoys' in Jamaica while 'Unsung' turns an observation of a spouse carer into a more personal ballad on the end of the family line. Amidst much of this is the possibility of some form of earthly redemption. A friend is about to be mugged until his cry wakes a whole streeet whose bedside lamps and their 'suddenness of yellow' saves him. A Short History of Beds We Have Slept in Together is a testament to passion even while that passion must be muffled by 'chewing,/ every night, on pillows'.
The voice too is governed somehwere between patois 'the ones I think in' and 'the ones I think you will understand'. We are promsied 'you may not catch evreything but chu-/ you will catch enough'. The patois is noticeable but not as pervasive older Caribbean pots such as Linton Kwesi-Johnson or Grace Nichols. It is certanily no barrier, especially when used to best effect in the folktales from Miller's homeland, related as 'De True Story of...' various characters. At times too it seems that the register is sacred, most notable in The Greed although it is not conventionally religious since it unequivocably oens 'When you no longer know God'.
There is ultimately more to this collection than song and light. The poems 'become something else/ entirely. The poem sings its own song,/ reaches its own end in its own time'.