Wise up! Wise down!

Bringing two poets together in a single collection is perhaps not that unusual, particularly if quite a few of the poems have been published before. What is unusual and appealing about this collection is that the poets and their poems seem to be in a dialogue with one another, a jazz conversation in which they riff on one another’s thoughts, go off at tangents and throw their own new shapes. Of course, I know John Agard, but Canadian poet, JonArno Lawson, I have never met. Perhaps it says something about my poor discernment that, until I find the initials at the end of each poem, I am never quite sure who wrote it. Equally it says a lot about the high quality of the work and the way their minds work together. Perhaps they really do know and admire one another as is suggested in some of the poems. There is, after all, one poem here they have written together. In that case we are privileged indeed to be allowed to look in on this poetic friendship. There are so many good poems here, it’s hard to know where to start. But let the poets introduce themselves: ‘Hello out there! I’m John Agard, I‘m supposed to be a poet, I’ll do my best to live up to it!’; ‘And I’m the other JA – JonArno Lawson. Be on your guard with Agard, and with Lawson, use caution.’ John Agard imagines Cinderella at the airport immigration. JonArno reports on Juliet from Baldicocks, who gets mixed up with Goldilocks, but who ‘has never sought the kind of fairytale-ish dangers/ that come from lying in the beds of hungry, furry strangers. “Or at least not as far as I know…,” said her handsome Romeo.’ Each has a poem about the mind. John Agard tells us about the man with the hat; JonArno tells us about the hat. John Agard writes “Out of the Blue”, JonArno writes “Into the Blue” and so it goes on. There are two other people who deserve credit for this brilliant collection. One is Satoshi Kitamura, Agard’s longtime illustrator partner who is here shared with John Arno. The other is whoever came up with the idea for this poetic partnership in the first place.