31 - Black and Asian British Women’s Poetry

Summary

This chapter engages with the thematic, formal, and linguistic breadth that characterises contemporary Black and Asian women’s poetry. It argues that the anthology continues to be an important platform for supporting, publishing, and disseminating Black and Asian women’s poetry, given the continuing dearth of publication opportunities for such poets. While there are continuities in style, form, and focus across the generations, there has been a significant shift away from a focus on identity towards more protean and fragmented forms. Language, migration, and diaspora remain central concerns, but are often more varied and diverse in their global reach, representing a wide range of experiences of crossings and arrivals, and of the melancholic un-belonging that often follows. The work of women poets across the generations is marked by a greater willingness to experiment with form, structure, and rhythm and to shift between experimental and expressive poetic registers with ease and confidence. In engaging a wide range of poets, this chapter prepares the ground for comparisons of similar preoccupations and concerns, charting continuities and discontinuities across the generations