Nii Ayikwei Parkes\u2019 d\u00e9but collection encompasses the story of a triangular trade in reverse \u2013 a family history that goes from the Caribbean back to Sierra Leone, and in his own life from London to Ghana, and back again.<\/p>\n
His gift as a poet is for the most rewarding kind of story-telling, including those stories told with wit and an engaging ambivalence about himself. His narratives move unerringly to a perfect punch-line, but in the collection as a whole there is a refreshing lack of complacency in his willingness to move out of his comfort zone and explore areas of imaginative fantasy, as in his Ballast<\/em> series, a tour de force of defamiliarisation, where he imagines how the slave trade would have gone had its mode of transport been the hot air balloon, rather than the slave ship.<\/p>\n There is much humour, but it comes from a family tradition of knowing that ‘our jokes weren\u2019t really funny, they were just sad\/ stories we learned to laugh at’. Like all poets with a largeness of heart, with no embarrassment about embracing the deepest feelings, Parkes has an especial sensitivity to the promise and acute sensitivities of childhood, both his own and others.<\/p>\n “An astonishing, powerful remix of history and language and the possibilities of both” Ali Smith, The Guardian<\/em><\/p>\n Nii Ayikwei Parkes is the author of three poetry pamphlets. In 2007 he was awarded Ghana’s National ACRAG award for poetry and literary advocacy.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nii Ayikwei Parkes\u2019 d\u00e9but collection encompasses the story of a triangular trade in reverse \u2013 a family history that goes from the Caribbean back to Sierra Leone, and in his own life from London to Ghana, and back again. His gift as a poet is for the most rewarding kind of story-telling, including those stories […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":51,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-50","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","tag-recent4"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/niiparkes.com\/open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/niiparkes.com\/open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/niiparkes.com\/open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/niiparkes.com\/open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/niiparkes.com\/open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/niiparkes.com\/open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":239,"href":"https:\/\/niiparkes.com\/open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions\/239"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/niiparkes.com\/open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/niiparkes.com\/open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/niiparkes.com\/open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/niiparkes.com\/open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}