Five underrated Black poets

Contemplating the strange, I’m comforted / By this narcotic thought: I know my soul. – Claude McKay, I Know My Soul

Growing up mixed-race in the Nineties

I didn’t read many Black writers growing up. Benjamin Zephaniah and Malorie Blackman got the usual rounds at school and our girl Flo (aka Baroness Benjamin) was a mainstay on British television, but anyone else? They weren’t even named, let alone present in the classroom. I grew up in a predominately white area of the UK after my parents moved out from London, so aside from the sheer amount of Motown, Whitney, and Luther in our house, there just wasn’t much Black representation going around.

So, despite being of Trinidadian heritage (plus Jewish and Irish), I’ve had to educate myself on the sheer richness of non-white literature. By the time I finished secondary school, Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith had made their way onto the curriculum, while at university, in the aptly-named ‘English and American Literature’, there were stirrings of postcolonial literature being discussed. The ‘Creative Writing’ side of my degree did a better job at this, which might be why most of my favourite Black writers are predominantly poets.

And their voices are as diverse, compelling, and fascinating as you’ll find in any canon of poetry.

So, here are five Black poets whose work really speaks to me – all from the Caribbean with the exception of the legendary Langston Hughes.

Kamau Brathwaite (1930-2020)

Barbadian Brathwaite, born Lawson Edward, really elevated the idea of non-standard English as ‘nation language’ and spent a lot of his academic career exploring all sorts of social, linguistic, and cultural aspects of life in both Africa and the African diaspora.

He truly innovated in his poetry, combining typefaces with non-traditional spelling and punctuation. His use of enjambment particularly hypnotic – ‘Bermudas’ is a great example of this, as is ‘Bread’:

rolled into night into night w/out morning

rolled into dead into dead w/out vision

rolled into life into life w/out dream

To get the full effect, I recommend listening to Brathwaite reading some of his poems.

Lorna Goodison (b.1947)

Goodison (who really looks like my mum in some pictures) is a former Poet Laureate of Jamaica who explores modern Caribbean culture. There’s a brightness and vitality to her poetry that reflects this, so no wonder she’s won every award under the sun.

Not only was Goodison born on Jamaica’s Emancipation Day, she also wrote ‘In Celebration of Emancipation’, quoted below:

It matters not when you did leave.

Every single one of a we

come out a the cane piece.

Langston Hughes (again) (1901-1967)

First mentioned in my Pride writers post, Hughes really is one of my all-timers. African-American (and of mixed heritage), Hughes was a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement full of aspiration. To me, this is embodied by Hughes’ ‘I Too’, which explores the brutal reality of being both Black and American – and yet also contains a bright hope:

Besides,

They’ll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

Claude McKay (1890-1947)

Another leader of the Harlem Renaissance, McKay was born in Jamaica and moved to the United States as a young man. ‘I Know My Soul’, quoted above, gives me chills, but I also want to highlight ‘If We Must Die’. It’s a Shakespearean sonnet that McKay wrote in response to the Red Summer (an intense period of lynching and race riots in 1919). The poem is so powerful, various apocryphal tales swirl around it: did Churchill quote from it? Was it read during Attica? Even these are urban myths, you can see why the poem would get attached to stories of defiance, war, and uprising with a final couplet like this:

Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Velma Pollard (1937-2025)

Pollard, also from Jamaica, sadly passed earlier this year. Like Brathwaite, she spent her career researching and raising the profile of the Caribbean’s sheer linguistic diversity, working extensively with Creole languages. I personally make comparisons between Pollard’s work and T.S. Eliot’s, especially the mix of realistic dialogue and description that characterises ‘The Waste Land’. Again, to get the full effect, I recommend listening to Pollard reading some of her poems, including ‘Crown Point’, the start of which is quoted below:

The sea hums endlessly
Stars through the darkness
wake my homespun peace…

Mixed-race representation in Coldharbour

As I’ve said before, the Wilde family in Coldharbour has a similar background to mine – my maternal gradnfather was from Trinidadian and in this case, Alex’s mother Carrie and uncle Harry are from Trinidad (and grew up in the same area as my parents, which was very West Indian and Irish dominated at the time).

So I think it’s time to hear about the dearly departed Carrie Wilde:

“My mum used to work here, you know,” Alex murmured. “She was working here the night …”

She’d smashed a glass, somebody had said. Alex thought that she’d heard it through Matthew or Shaz, who’d heard it from Sam, who’d heard it from one of his parents, Leo more likely than Marilyn, who’d have heard it from someone else who might’ve actually been there. But apparently, according to this story made up of half-whispers and the usual rumours:

Carrie Wilde had been pouring a pint.

She had dropped the glass.

She looked like she’d seen a ghost.

She said that she’d seen a ghost.

Alex had never believed that part. All the time she’d known her mother, for all those fifteen fraught years, they’d kept their Power tightly under wraps. It had been bad enough Shaz and Sam knew.