Bill Griffiths' poem Mr Tapscott (Amra, L3) probably won't get
widespread coverage as a contribution to the current debate about
'institutional racism' but is relevant as could be. The poem focusses on
the doubtful conviction of Ray Gilbert for murder in Liverpool in 1981;
the account is embedded in a snapshot documentary history of Liverpool,
as background to the constant marginalisation of its immigrant community
by the white power-structure. With attention to the wider historical-
political-philosophical sweep of the breakdown of the British Empire and
the establishment of the so-called Commonwealth with its reification of
white England as a peculiarly privileged historical site. If it were
straight documentary it would impress - so much raw material condensed
into a quite short pamphlet - but more than anything it's Bill's ability
to compress the material in one jump into poetry, flashes of phrase &
image twenty-five to the dozen. I haven't come across anybody else who
can write it that way. The Guardian, predictably, prefers the puffy
rhetoric of Benjamin Zephaniah.
--
Alan Halsey
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