Jean Binta Breeze read, sang, and sang-spoke her poems for an uninterrupted
hour at the Highfields Library in Leicester tonight.
Highfields is a model almost of an inner-city poor quarter : its housing
stock is virtually all Victorian redbrick, its streetlighting is poor, it
has a substantial Asian & Afro-Carribean population interspersed with
students, habitues of' 'care in the community', young professionals
enamoured of cheap mortgages, the terminally single and solitary drinkers.
It is peppered with Indian restaurants, Halal butchers, rooming houses for
ethnic Serbs, second-hand shops and the cornucopia of the world's religions:
a mosque, a synagogue, a Catholic club and an Anglican church turned
evangelical. It is Leicester's traditional red-light zone and the easiest
place in town to acquire hard drugs. There is the occasional shooting. It is
often implied on the streets that its Drug and Vice Squads are not untouched
by corruption but the local media, council and MP's never air this view.
Jean Binta Breeze's poems are simple. They deal with the lives of ordinary
people, ordinary black women in particular,  with an assured handling of
Caribbean dialect. She reads with professionalism - her projection and
breath-control are almost flawless and her attitude towards her audience
seems devoid of condescension but full of warmth. She sat on table's edge to
read. Her audience comprised about 50 people, from a variety of social
classes and ethnic groups. I managed to speak to about a quarter of the
audience after the reading and approbation was universal.
I doubt if I'd be greatly taken by these poems on the page. I could listen
to her perform them again and again. I do not know of any established
'avant-garde' poets with her assurance with a vernacular. Technically the
poems are undemanding.
I found poetry a friendlier art tonight, a warmer place of the mind. As did
all her audience.



(the reading was co-hosted by Leicester Libraries and Leicester Poetry
Society. Pat Corina 'chaired')

david



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