Quiet by Victoria Adukwei Bulley (Faber, £10.99)
“Bones can speak long after the flesh has gone.” Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s debut is an exploration of the power of silence as a means of resistance, a way of carving space for the self in a hostile world. Rooted in Black feminist thinking, the poems have a clear-eyed elegance, buttressed with a controlled ferocity that is acute on the damage done by institutional blankness, and how it forces an uncomfortable conformity: “They were too happy / to realise they were poster girls / for the effacement of themselves.” Bulley, a former Barbican Young Poet and poet-in-residence at the V&A Museum, achieves a tone both delicate and strong, studded with moments that catch the breath: “if your pain is alive in me / so too must be your joy”. With a generous and interrogative spirit, Quiet marks the arrival of a major poetic talent.
