Island Man by Grace Nichols (1984): a Caribbean man wakes in London to the sound of his island's sea in his head, before the traffic of the North Circular pulls him into another day.
Nichols's move from Guyana to Britain, the unpunctuated free verse and its spacing, key quotations, and the poems it compares well with.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'and island man wakes up / to the sound of blue surf / in his head', 'the steady breaking and wombing', 'and fishermen pushing out to sea', 'the sun surfacing defiantly', 'of his small emerald island', 'he always comes back groggily groggily', 'Comes back to sands / of a grey metallic soar', 'to dull North Circular roar', 'his crumpled pillow waves', 'Another London day'.
Form: free verse with no punctuation, lower-case 'island man' as if he has no name, gaps and indents that make the reader pause, and repeated words ('groggily groggily', 'muffling muffling').
Structure: five stanzas that move from the island in his dream to London's traffic as he wakes, ending on a single line set apart.
Context: Nichols, born in Guyana in 1950, moved to Britain in 1977, and her poetry carries Caribbean rhythms and culture; the North Circular, a congested ring road around north London.
Compares well with The Émigrée (a homeland remembered in a new city), Peckham Rye Lane (a London location) and Mild the Mist Upon the Hill (the senses carrying the speaker to a home far away).
