Hot Earth, Cold Earth

Hot Earth Cold Earth is a large selection of new poems by James Berry, one of Britain's leading poets and cultural activists. The book celebrates the divided world of a lifelong outsider, a poet of two tongues, 'Hot Earth' Creole and 'Cold Earth' English. Growing up in Jamaica, Berry felt as much disturbed by his African background as by the European slave-trade and its aftermath in his childhood. The book shows how 'root-agonies' make him view Africa as a thoughtless and neglectful mother, how his years in Britain leave him worried by past, present and future. Yet Hot Earth Cold Earth grapples with a destructiveness in basic instincts. And, in spite of what Berry calls 'the vices and howlings of a cultural-crossing', a defiant spirit of celebration has clearly been 'neither wiped away nor drowned', for these vividly imaginative poems show him - now 70 - writing at the height of his powers. As a bonus, Hot Earth Cold Earth also includes the best work from his last collection, Chain of Days, which has been unavailable for many years.The poems of Hot Earth Cold Earth are now reprinted in James Berry's A Story I Am In: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2011).