Passport to Here and There

To write beyond middle age with anything like the transmuting fire of youth requires – so the adage says – much wilful forgetting in order to remember at a deeper level of meaning for readers. Grace Nichols in this new collection of her work succeeds in revisiting her Guyana past to make poems of lightness and diction and depth of feeling. The Demerara region takes on heraldic relevance and the people in it, principally her parents, along with flora and fauna, populate a landscape of metaphoric and allegorical longing. Her simple diction belies a complex emotional intellect and a feel for the balance of a line, its weightlessness in collusion with a depth of feeling. This may be Grace Nichols at her best, in poems that chime with bright imagery and lasting phrasing worthy of chanting to undermine and contradict, if not bringing down the authoritarian edifices of our dangerous times. -- Fred D'Aguiar
Not only rich music, an easy lyricism, but also grit, and earthy honesty, a willingness to be vulnerable and clean. -- Gwendolyn Brooks
Grace Nichols has wit, acidity, tenderness, any number of gifts at her disposal. -- Jeanette Winterson
From her first collection in 1983, I Is a Long Memoried Woman, she has been a strong presence in the linguistic interweave between the Caribbean and the UK. Her poetry and prose move easily between the poised world of Western culture, Old World history and myth, and the gritty rhythms of the Caribbean everyday… There is wit, irony and passion…real poise. -- Michelene Wandor * Poetry Review *