Embrace the Page-stage

Patience Agbabi, Bloodshot Monochrome, 2008
Every morning and afternoon I take a bus that travels through the East of London, making stops in Hackney and Dalston. Bastions once of the English white working class, they are now neighbourhoods made up mostly of descendants of the African and Caribbean immigrants that arrived in Britain in the last fifty years. Poems by a black woman born in Britain (such as Patience Agbabi) are, therefore, the perfect companions to these bus rides, that seem to jump so often from the page onto the side-walk rushing past me.

Bloodshot Monochrome is a collection of sonnets (14-line poems), divided in five parts, that play with the history of the format. Early on, she brings up the past criticism levelled at some black writers that they were "less black" for using a poetic form created by white men. She tackles this through a philosophical humour, by making herself out to be an agony aunt that replies to the worries of Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, and many more.

Her themes vary and repeat themselves: the desire for a continuum between the black and white experience (the "grey area" that ironically means high unemployment here in Britain); the world of Gaydar and ecstasy in gay clubs such as Heaven (with a racist comment instigating her comedown); wives and mothers struggling with their marriages and children - fantasizing about hitmen, seductive waitresses and bitter fairy-tale lives. Music is never too far off, with nods to Northern Soul, rap and Billie Holiday.

Once or twice I was let down by a sentence too close to a cliché, too predictable; a few of the poems didn't seem worth reading twice. However, the overall effect of this short book is to smooth over any of these tiny creases and leave you with a vivid feeling for the contemporary Britain she materializes into view.