Letters from the Black Ark

"LETTERS FROM THE BLACK ARK is a book about and of dub. The word dub accrues a subtle lyrical connotation from its many occurrences as "bestow", "vest", "crown", but also "suspend", "reverb", "echo", and "sever". Dub poetry, in other words, doesn't simply reveal or conceal (danger, fear, blindness, or failure) but also points the way to the knowledge that bestows and severs, and the conditions that produce black poetic music. In Marriott's poetry, the tragic catastrophes of recent black existence - London knife crime, the Windrush scandal, Grenfell, deadly race violence - are revealed as questions of language, with patois acting as a code word (a deep base expression). To speak this language, he implies, is to be bestowed by what sunders. But this is also why to be dubbed functions as a blow, an oracle, and a grim reverberation. In these poems of loss, exile, and obliteration, the poet foresees his own downfall and metamorphosis. But unfortunately, and too late, he realizes he cannot transcend these reverberations, nor the echoes laden with black social death"--