As I was reading this brilliant debut collection I found myself thinking of Anna Akhmatova, which may be a surprise to everyone who has read this collection. But I was thinking particularly of those famous lines in Requiem: I've already mentioned one other poet, Anna Akhmatova, but this collection also reminded of something Ilya Kaminsky wrote in Deaf Republic: Takes us into new literary territory ... impressive' Bernardine Evaristo, New Statesman (Books of the Year)

Some of the poems are difficult to penetrate, written in a coded language; others are more accessible, but all of them serve as a testament to a neighbourhood-worth generation of boys in all of its specificity. ⁠ Femi is a film-maker and photographer as well as a poet, and he became London’s first young people’s laureate in 2016. Scattered through the text are his own photos, which range from happy family gatherings to police crime scenes, from the geometric spines of multi-storey staircases to near abstract plays of brilliant light, and shadowy portraits of youths in hoodies.

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He had only properly met his parents less than a year earlier, because they had emigrated to London from Nigeria when he was a baby, leaving their children behind with a grandfather and an uncle until they had saved enough money to bring them over. Their circumstances were still difficult and he knows all about going to school hungry, he says. “Dinner time was when we ate.” This review is a case of tough love (see * at the end of the review), but I think I am being fair. The issues here, for me, are those typical of a young debut author — inconsistency. I can't emphasise enough how good this collection is. There were so many moments where I found myself stopping to think about what I'd just read because it had got under my skin. It's a collection that makes you feel as well as think though. For now his own space is a flat in Deptford, which he shares with a cat called Dennis Adeyemi. It’s a female cat, he volunteers, because he had originally intended to adopt a male but took pity on the runt of the litter and couldn’t be bothered to think up a new name. He is by nature self-contained and nomadic, in regular touch with, but not close to his family, tramping the city streets with a head full of plans, dreaming of the films he will make and the poems he will write.

His two-year tenure as young people’s laureate coincided with one of London’s most horrifying urban design disasters, the Grenfell Tower fire. “In the future,” he writes, in a diary extract from the time, “every time I write grief on my phone its autocorrect asks if I mean Grenfell: have I written Grenfell so many times that it has registered it as a familiar word, or is this how collective mourning works?”Chosen as a Book of the Year by New Statesman, Financial Times, Guardian, Observer, Rough Trade and the BBC Armitstead, Claire (30 October 2020). "Caleb Femi: 'Henceforth I'm solely preoccupied with being a merchant of joy' ". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 16 November 2020. The problem is, most of the remaining poems were not as compelling to me (1-2*). It's strange to 'rate' a lived experience and a cultural history, but at one point we must, and for me it comes down to whether the language or ideas conveyed are gripping and thoughtful. What is it like to grow up in a place where the same police officer who told your primary school class they were special stops and searches you at 13 because 'you fit the description of a man' - and where it is possible to walk two and a half miles through an estate of 1,444 homes without ever touching the ground? a b c Peirson-Hagger, Ellen (28 October 2020). "Caleb Femi: 'Poetry is the art of the people' ". New Statesman . Retrieved 14 December 2020.