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There is an Anger That Moves by Kei Miller
(Carcanet, 2007)

“Broken is the shape of everything” writes Kei Miller in his second collection, There is an Anger That Moves. In many respects he is right; the book deftly explores a sense of broken history; geographical, cultural and linguistic displacement and a haunting representation of the very notion of belonging. However, the poetry he presents here is anything but broken. Miller divides this poetic journey into six sequences which has the potential to put the reader in the position of a traveller at a station waiting to make their connection(s), but thankfully it doesn’t, each section cleverly interweaves the overarching themes.

The collection opens with Miller’s geographical displacement from Jamaica to an England in which he struggles to belong; “hard / as you fight to break in / was as hard as you fought to leave.” His exploration of language is particularly poignant; the poem, ‘How we became pirates’, exemplifies Gordon Rohlehr’s assertion “that the English language has long ceased to be the single property of any one people.” Miller writes:

… we shape words differently.
But maybe it’s the old colonial hurt …
raiding English from the English, …
So English poetry is no longer from England.’

Miller layers the opening section of the book with a sense of longing for the familiarity of Jamaican culture, food and music and more specifically Jamaican patois. This is most succinctly expressed in the lines

… you say bomboclawt
softly, like a prayer, like Amen.
Words once profane seem holy here.

His reverence for language is exquisite throughout, but this sense of prayer, is found though other sections of the book, most notably those in which he evokes vibrant scenes of Jamaica through the stories of women in the evangelical churches. However, the strongest element of this collection is Miller’s exploration of the poetic “I” in the two sections entitled ‘The Broken (I & II)’. Here, Miller explodes the very notion of writing “himself” both physically and metaphorically, he writes;

… I was hiding
behind sleight-of-hand, behind birds
and unruly clocks – metaphors
that said nothing honestly.

In writing honestly, he demonstrates the delicate way in which self-identity (especially with regards to sexuality) is hidden but ultimately exposed; in the same way that Pandora’s Box cannot be closed once opened, he laments ‘I break … I am written.’

This honesty is also tangible when Miller writes of love (in all its forms); his use of metaphor and imagery is exceptional;

… We are different
islands, our borders salted differently.
Love is how our skin breaks against each other,
how we bleed into each other; how we heal.

In conclusion, this collection demonstrates Kei Miller’s powerful, self assured and original voice. My only hope is that the next collection equals the control, the impact and the depth of this one. This is a book of intense emotion; belonging, love, fear, regret, and it was not simply the anger that moved me.