Linton Kwesi Johnson: ‘I certainly did not see myself as an angry young black poet’

‘Reggae gave us a sense of independent identity that was all our own’: Linton Kwesi Johnson. Photograph: Adama Jalloh/The Observer

The new Penguin edition of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Selected Poems comprises three previously unpublished verses, the most recent of which is titled Di First Lackdoun. Written in August 2021 in his signature style – London-Jamaican patois rendered as it is spoken – it recounts a walk he took in his local park in Brixton as the long weeks of the first winter Covid gave way to spring.

people juss skattah like littah
all ovah di clean-cut carpets of green
redeemin ert an sky an sunlite