A sequence of short features focusing on the five individual young poets included in the recently-launched collection Rising Stars published by Otter-Barry Books.

Boorn in 1997 and raised in East London, Amina Jama is a Somali-British writer and member of the Barbican Young Poets collective. She has had worked published by the Sula Collective, an online magazine ‘for and by people of colour’.

There are several examples of her spoken word poetry on YouTube, including this powerful piece performed for an adult audience.

‘The House At The End Of The Street’ is one of the best poems in the Rising Stars collection

One of the ironies of an anthology of poets known for their spoken word work is that it contains so many poems that do not rely on performance for their impact. This may be because the poets’ performed poetry is usually more adult in theme. Whatever the reason, ‘The House At The End Of The Street’, about a best friend moving home, is one such example of a poem that has full adequacy as printed words on a page.

Written in rhyming couplets it is lightly descriptive in a manner that belies the emotion behind it.

Leila was my best friend since Year Two.
For years we got each other through.

I was there when her dad left her mum,
I plaited her hair and stroked her heart until she was numb.

Now she was moving out from her house at the end of the street
and another kid would come into class and take her seat.

I also like the ambiguity at the start of the poem. Why are there ‘officers and firemen going in and out’? What of the ‘distant burnt smell’?

There is a welcome sense of humour in ‘Car Ride’, a poem about a father who always gets the words to songs wrong:

He would sing, ‘The Grand Old Duke of Pork…’
‘No, Dad!’ we’d scream. “It’s York!.”

No matter how many times we’d tell him
that there was no Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Fart,
and the song was not Row, Row, Row Your Goat…

Links to pieces about the other poets in the collection:

• Ruth Awolola
• Victoria Adukwei Bulley
• Abigail Cook
• Jay Hulme

A sequence of short features focusing on the five individual young poets included in the recently-launched collection Rising Stars published by Otter-Barry Books.

Abigail Cook is a SLAMbassadors-winning performance poet from London, and currently a student at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

The opening poem in Abigail’s section of Rising Stars:

Some of Cook’s other spoken (and sung) work can be found on Soundcloud.

As that opening poem suggests (‘My body is the garden I grew up in’ … ‘My hair is the ocean’… ‘My shoulders are bird’s wings’) Cook’s poetry is rich in metaphor.

‘Storm of a Girl’ begins

I have two storms inside me
I call them my mother and father.

Whereas much young writing in this style can be overly abstract and lacking in concrete detail, Cook conjures up the experience of adolescence extremely vividly – especially those first times of being away from (but still close by) the family home, staying up late under starry skies. 

In the second poem, ‘Brother’

One night
we lay on the driveway
and counted every star
in the sky
plucked them and placed them in our pockets
there to light the way for the darkness ahead

Again, on ‘Night-time in the garden’

We wash ourselves in raindrops
sleep covered in leaves,
count every star in the sky,
watch the world go by.

Cook’s final poem ‘Summer Day’ is her strongest, perfectly capturing that best of all coming-of-age sensations: a powerful sense of benign, innocently-equipped omnipotence.

The summer was long and hot.
We sat outside in our pyjamas
whilst the world ended.

…

We spoke as if the sun would never rise again.
We spoke with laughter dripping from our lips,
trying to be braver,
and decided we would save the world.
With sticks as our swords
and sharpened ends
we saved the day
again.

Posts about the other poets in the collection will follow shortly.
Ruth Awolola
Victoria Adukwei Bulley