Sturge TownSturge Town is a stunning collection of poems that connects with the earliest days of Kwame Dawes work as a poet, from the roots of childhood in Ghana to the reflections of a man turned sixty who is witnessing his children occupying the space he once considered his own. It ranges from poems that make something special of the everyday, to poems of the most astonishing imaginative leaps. There are poems that speak most movingly of moments of acute self

and the work’s easy enough

Anne Tannam

as it were

She is already forty and can’t bear to let the opportunity pass her by

Down and dirty

The only certainty is that we killed each other for more than fifteen years

from nuclear power stations and fighter plane flypasts to forests

In the continuing rite of return to his native Barbados from longer and longer away

Granier shows us the thin partition dividing a chilled sense of mortality from that throbbing everyday life we live and try to be aware of

Where neither computers nor printers were available

Edgar Mittelholzer

he was forged in the crucible of China’s Cultural Revolution