Books like There Is an Anger that Moves

(3.5) I didn’t like this quite as much as The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, which I read in 2015. That collection stood out a bit more for its use of Jamaican patois and slang. Here Jamaican heritage is contrasted with life in the UK and USA (e.g. “The only thing far away” and “Where we might fit”), and prophecy and scripture are frequent points of reference. However, as in Zion, these are broken up by one more frivolous-tending poem with a delightfully long title: there it was “When Considering the Long, Long Journey of 28,000 Rubber Ducks”; here it’s “In praise of the revolutionary properties of ice cream, but in particular, the flavour Chunky Monkey.”Favorite lines:“I would write about the love / of men and the fear of stones / which in my country is the same thing.” (from “The Broken (I),” Part II)“In the evening, people stand / in the frame of their apartment windows / like a pack of cards spread before me.” (from “New York poem (2006)”)“my grandfathers were / a writer and a preacher, and they meet inside me.” (from “Second Book of Chronicles”)“Ula-May, keeper, interpreter and dispenser / of rules, read the Book of Leviticus once a month. / She believed only in laws that forbade, / none that allowed, so she did-not / more than she ever did.” (from “An allowance for Ula-May”)