Review: Poor by Caleb Femi
Caleb Femi’s Poor is a 160 paged love-letter to Peckham, Black boys and the painful joy of their vulnerability. The collection is tinged with bio mythological pride, tentative introspection and sacred mourning as it speaks to themes ranging from gentrification and brutalist architecture to the vibrant electric life of those living on the block.
In ‘Barter’ we are introduced to the scope of Femi’s range, as – with a single metaphor – he manages to cover erased historical genealogy, gentrification and the price vulnerability comes at while being a Black man: ‘I cried & my tears nearly filled up to the ceiling/& she not being able to swim drowned’. The theme of exchange is a reoccurring one and speaks to the transactional nature of survival, something which the title of the collection speaks to; what life is like when a rigged transaction of living leads to imbalance, death and loss. This is particularly present in ‘The Painting On The Concrete Wall’, ‘The First Time you Hold a Gun’ and ‘On Magic/Violence’, with the latter poem featuring a particularly poignant line about the price of living; ‘When hipsters take selfies on the corners where our/friends died, the rent goes up.’ – ‘On Magic/Violence’
The collection is anything other than one dimensional, however, with Femi utilising dual perspectives juxtaposition, and creative narrators throughout to conjure powerful images of different worlds being experienced simultaneously. This can be found in poems such as ‘A Designer Talks of a Home/A Resident Talks of Home (I)’, ‘Schrödinger’s Black’ and ‘Collective Noun: A Play by an Onlooker’ – where two CCTV cameras provide a satirical narration while they watch a Black boy being tackled to the ground by the police. The breaking up of Femi’s photography throughout the pages bookmark his poems, not only grounding them in a warm and three-dimensional archival feel, but also bringing to life the perspectives of his subjects by showing us their image. In this way, Femi manages to successfully show multiple intimate visuals of his community through images and words.
These multi-narratives are cemented by his use of format – his regular uses of double columns provide a clever tool for expressing joint perspectives side by side. Despite the injustice, loss and grief that run throughout, Poor is a celebration of the boldness of those living life from within the margins. There is a powerful palpable anger present in ‘Excerpts from Journal Entries 2017’, and especially in ‘16th October 2017’. Femi centres and elevates the subjects of his poems to a sacred religious status with poems such as ‘The Book of The Generation of Peckham Boys’, where he immortalises his subjects as ghosts, gods and legends of myth through metaphor. His use of language is successful at generating powerful images which linger with the reader long after finishing: ‘The inside of a hoodie is a veiled nook where a boy pours himself/into a single drop of rain to feed a forest.’ – ‘Boys In Hoodies’ The colour blue and the image of concrete serve as extended metaphors throughout his collection, and these colours of blue and grey loop well into the mourning and loss neatly threaded throughout the poems. They successfully tie together the sadness of lost possibilities and the cold brutality of their demise. Caleb especially excels in his use of micro metaphorical focus to expand into macro societal themes; zooming right into the detail of an image before broadening out to the meta implications he wants us to direct our attention to: ‘slip the slope of your ankle into the canvas… for you walk in what I might have been’ - ‘Concrete (I)’
Some of my favourites poems in the collection included:
‘Put Them in the Room of Spirit & Slow Time’
‘Thirteen’
‘Concrete (I)’
‘Schrodinger’s Black’ (a brilliant conceptualisation on Black death and the feeling of being alive and dead at the same time, I found the play on words at the end of his last lines particularly worthy of poetic genius)
‘Survivors Guilt’ (‘I am a museum of all the ghosts I could have been’ still haunts me)
‘Coping’
‘Things I have Stolen’
‘Repress’
‘Concrete Agriculture’
My only wish for Poor was for it to colour-in and further explore the topics in relation to the women figures that were outlined – these poems always seemed to stop just at the point where the intent was stated. The woman drowning in his tears, the fetishisation of a light-skin crush, and the expected objectification and subservience of Black women were all touched upon but would have flourished if blessed with even one more line. Nevertheless, there are beautiful snapshots of relationships and love that are present. Overall, within Poor lies the accomplishment of a young and sharp poetic eye, I'm excited to see a lot more from Caleb Femi. His poetry announces itself on the scene as a the poetic kin of Kayo Chingonyi and Yrsa Daley-Ward’s work, as well as a cousin-across-the-pond to Danez Smith’s. Poor by Caleb Femi is available for purchase at Sevenoaks.