Reviews

'Brilliant, subversive, surreal. Playful yet biting, Elmi is masterful. Hilarious. A high wire act of language.'

With music at its core, Samatar Elmi's The Epic of Cader Idris' themes resonate across history, mythology, philosophy and consciousness. The result is an expansive book that maintains a constant tune in the key of displacement - a daring, ambitious pleasure to read.

This is radical wordplay, a sometimes dizzying flux of cultures, references and registers, as Elmi savours the different flavours and provenances of a huge vocabulary: “I hail from a long line of / Travelling Jugglers / Who died with ten rocks in suspension / And the unfinished poem etched onto them” - Everything here is in a quantum state, alive with the possibility of things reconfiguring themselves – history, place-names, languages - becoming something other. The mission statement has been clear: “Language is the house of Being. So what choice do you have when language, the very worldhood of the world, is arrayed against you? You go to the word, lay siege… you tunnel deep within the foundations and where possible, dismantle brick by brick.…” But the military metaphors miss the exuberance, the sheer delight, of Elmi’s deconstruction; this is not destruction but clearing the way, words being tumbled and rinsed so they can reach to the affection and the celebration, to the ‘truth and reconciliation’ we arrive at in the closing pages of this book" “I sit in the dock gavel in hand wave at myself in the witness stand Liberty, jail, each with their chains I offer and accept their testimony.”

Intimate and epic, dark and profound, interweaving hip hop beats with the mythology of the British Isles, Samatar Elmi's A Darker Light is an unforgettable debut collection about the gift and curse of diaspora. With a watchful eye on the minutiae of nature's cycles of life and death, and a profound connection to the land and language that make and unmake our histories, Elmi's poems shine with grace and blaze with defiance.

The first full collection by a poet who, as Knomad Spock, is also a musician, is unsurprisingly full of music and returns the “epic” to the idea of a long, storytelling song-poem... Elmi is gloriously the latter. “Somewhere … / between Eliot and Walcott, / a sort of neo-something-or-other”, he gives us work of real feeling and hybridising intelligence: Zippos and coffee mugs, Wittgenstein and Kendrick Lamar, and a brilliance all his own. “When I hold a clarinet, it burns like the cigarette I play"