Cardigan Arrest: Poetry in Punglish
Robert Potts, 21 June 2007
At the end of David Dabydeen’s poem ‘Coolie Odyssey’ (1988), the poet, deracinated by education, distance and time from the dirt-poor ancestors he is elegising, considers his British audience:
congregations of the educated Sipping wine, attentive between courses – See the applause fluttering from their white hands
Like so many messy table napkins.
The poem’s...