A new beginning

by Kwame Senu Neville Dawes

"When Speak from Here to There was published in 2016, it was seen as doing something quite new: two poets recognised as being at the top of their game in, respectively, Australian and Caribbean poetry, had risked, in the words of Will Harris, the almost daily "structure of call-and-response, each utterance...filtered through the other". Karen McCarthy Wolf noted in Speak from Here to There, a "warmth...in the correspondence...between a black man almost but not quite marooned in the white of America's Midwest, and a white man negotiating his own exile from the vast physical and historical...