The Fat Black Woman's Poems: Virago 50th Anniversary Edition

Description

Beauty is a fat black woman walking the fields pressing a breezed hibiscus to her cheek while the sun lights up her feet Nichols gives us images that stare us straight in the eye, images of joy, challenge, accusation. Her 'fat black woman' is brash; rejoices in herself; poses awkward questions to politicians, rulers, suitors, to a white world that still turns its back. Grace Nichols writes in a language that is wonderfully vivid yet economical of the pleasures and sadnesses of memory, of loving, of 'the power to be what I am, a woman, charting my own futures'.

Born in 1950 in Guyana, where she grew up, Grace Nichols worked as a journalist and reporter. She came to Britain in 1977 and has published several children's books. Her cycle of poems, I Is a Long Memoried Woman, won the 1983 Commonwealth Poetry Prize.

Deliciously inert and self contented, the fat black woman mocks oppression by the scandal of being herself...--INDEPENDENT on Sunday Run naturally and economically off the tongue. Beneath the folk rhythms and the lyrical simplicities, Nichols's poems preach disquiet--OBSERVER