Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head: Shortlisted for the 2022 Felix Dennis Prize

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Shire’s assured voice teems with righteous fury, tempered by rich language to create a memorable and powerful book. This fierce and compelling book of poems should come with a warning label: These poems will break your heart. I was a little upset that some of poems where in the previous book, but she made changes to them that feel like final forms that really fit into the maturity of her talent and this book. The poem has been used and gone viral during many refugee situations, and she has said in interviews ' I wrote those words for Black immigrants, and the most I’ve ever seen those words used was when the immigrants and refugees were lighter-skinned with lighter eyes.

Within these poems is a woman wrestling her various hauntings: her body a site of savage surveillance, her girlhood a long inventory of violation, her home no longer a home but “the mouth of a shark.

It took me eight months to get through this because there were too many lines and entire poems that genuinely made me burst into tears. In 2012 she represented Somalia at the Poetry Parnassus, the festival of the world poets at the Southbank, London. Italicised lyrics chime in a dichotomous weave of pain and suffering as Gloria Gaynor synthesises in our minds, ‘At first I was afraid, I was petrified[. But even Aabo was innocent once, as was Hooyo and the generations of Africans scattered by ‘the white gloved hand of Europe[.

She does so through vignettes of her own family and community members in a way that blurs the boundary between blood relations and a greater cultural history. Somali-British poet, Warsan Shire draws us into the complexities of the transition from girl to woman, immigrant to citizen, in this, her much awaited and first full collection.Poems of women using pigeon blood on their wedding night to appear ‘ chaste’, to ‘ protecting body and home / from intruders. Sono rimasta folgorata da questa raccolta di poesia, la complessità e la varietà dei temi a comporre il mosaico di essere donne migranti, africane, nere, musulmane, divise tra la nostalgia della patria e l’adattamento al mondo occidentale, figlie rifiutate o poco amate… tanti, tantissimi argomenti, ma raccontati con pennellate folgoranti (mi ripeto ma è il termine giusto), dolorose, estremamente vivide ma mai pietose.

The influential and reworked poem ‘HOME’ lays bare the fallacy and social predicament of refugees; do they enter the western world to freedom? I have collected so many of their lines over the years, and (to borrow an expression from Christina Sharpe) they have collected me too. This to say that I thought some of these poems were striking and memorable (particularly the one on Victoria Climbie), whereas others - whilst including some great imagery and writing - didn't leave much of an impression.Drawing from her own life and the lives of loved ones, as well as pop culture and news headlines, Shire finds vivid, unique details in the experiences of refugees and immigrants, mothers and daughters, Black women and teenage girls.

While Shire’s presentation of powerful narratives can draw a deep reaction from readers, her straightforward structure and often disconnected tone makes the collection feel incomplete. In the poem, Jones gets blown up with titles such as “patron saint of the unapproachable,” creating a stark step away from the feeling of previous poems — one that creates an underwhelming close to the collection. The scrutinizing process of immigration paperwork and outsider refugee status was certainly preferable to the taunting and heckling of those in her new country or finding a child’s body amongst the rubble from her war-ravaged homeland.Non metto punteggio pieno perché ho dei dubbi sulle traduzioni, che mi sembrano poco centrate e, in alcuni casi, superficiali. If you're familiar with Shire's previous work, this collection of poems feels familiar, even with the recent additions. At the time, I hadn't read that much (modern) poetry and felt like a lot of things flew over my head. Warshan Shire is a young Kenyan-born Somali poet and this book is her 1st full length collection of poems.