Ronnie McGrath

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Biographical note:  Ronnie McGrath is a Creative Writing Lecturer at Imperial College London and the University of The Arts, London College of Communication. A former musician, he was a founding member of the defunct musical group the London Afro Blok, who toured Europe, performed for the Queen and opened the 1994 Commonwealth Games in British Columbia, Canada. In 1993, he was commended for his writing by ACER, who later published and awarded 1st place for his writing in 1994. As a contemporary artist, he has exhibited his work throughout London.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714698
ISBN:  9781844714698
Author:  Ronnie McGrath
Title:  Data Trace
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Oct-10
Extent:  96pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  8 mm
Weight:  144 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  The Basquiat of contemporary writing, Ronnie McGrath’s DATA TRACE is a collection of innovative poetry that sheds light on the changing nature of a poet’s identity and his experience of growing up in Britain. It is an earnest look at the ‘self’ as raced and un-raced, sexualised and un-sexualised, gendered and yet stripped to the bone of an impossibility to define ‘self’ in a fast and forever changing world.

Main description:  The Basquiat of contemporary writing, Ronnie McGrath’s DATA TRACE is a collection of innovative poetry that sheds light on the changing nature of a poet’s identity and his experience of growing up in Britain. It is an earnest look at the ‘self’ as raced and un-raced, sexualised and un-sexualised, gendered and yet stripped to the bone of an impossibility to define ‘self’ in a fast and forever changing world.

A celebration of the new, DATA TRACE is a peek into the fecund mind of a poet whose work is complex and yet accessible, welcomingly fresh and stubbornly vibrant in its attempt to capture the sensibility of contemporary Britain. The connoisseur of innovative writing will note the rich and varied palette of a writer who is informed by such literary movements as DADA, Surrealism, Afro-Futurism, Speculative Fiction and experimentation. Reminiscent of the writings of such poets as Clarence Major, Jayne Cortez, Bob Kaufman, The Last Poets, Cecil Taylor and Gil-Scot Heron, to mention but a few, DATA TRACE is best described as Benjamin Zephaniah and Linton Kwesi Johnson infused with a post-Caribbean, postmodern and post Black British sensibility. Undoubtedly this is tomorrow’s poetry for the lover of contemporary writing.

Table of contents:
On Becoming A Poet
Diasfrican
The Catalyst: Ode to Sun Ra
Black Orchid Milk
Satchmo’s Lips
Poem for Ani-Difranco
Elocutionary Tongues in Obedience of Language
Perfect One
Extract From A Charlie Parker Solo
How Di Body?
Milford’s Paradiddle
Acoustic Avant-Gardism
Streams of consciousness poems for neo-surrealists
Blood
Mingus Music Act I
Hi-koo
Mingus Music Act II
Dear Poet
Dear Reader
Her ankhles on a slipperless shoe/ version I–one
Her ankhles on a slipperless shu/ version II–2
Her ankhles on a slipperless shoe/ version III–3
Poem That Gets Up Nose & Into Arse-Crack Phunke
Apertures Of The Soul In Sneak Preview
blk brother blk british brother
The DNA of an Other’s Wig
Barber-shop man
Untitled
Creationation I
Jig
Philosophy, Religion, Race, Death, Our Father, In Laws, School, Big Brother, Mother, Ex-Girlfriend, Poetry, Black Publisher, The Black Playwright, bredrin Her Patois is Montage
I slip into the solitude of a blank page
Brass Fantasy
Perpendicularities in Fetishes of Rubber and Brass
Spiral Beauty Out of Control
The Rainbow of Her Beauty
The Theory Of Everything
A Poem For Literary Critics Who Like Their Whisky Neat
Sez
Dark Countries In
Canon Fire Is A Blind Institution
In The Neon Signs Of …
Circles of Polysemy

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Excerpt from book:  

The Rainbow of Her Beauty

In the celebrity of
Camera-shoots
And magazine covers

Bare breasted models
Inflate their lips with
The frantic cries of billboard messages

Thin but not quite waif enough
To dine with butterflies
The faceless strings of their hidden beauty
Sharpen scalpel-blades

As the plastic surgeon
Sturdy as a hungry penis makes an incision
And pours the wealth of stockbrokers
Into their teenage thighs

And as the secrets of their thongs
Peek out of hipster-trousers
Titillating monsters

The school yards of their innocent years
Throw dead skipping ropes
Into the tears of polluted riverbeds.

Unpublished endorsement:  As a surrealist poet Ronnie McGrath is forever experimenting with the shape, rhythm and sound. Ronnie bends language because as he says reality is up for grabs. It is Ronnie’s courage to take risks with the landscape of the word that produces work, which touches our hearts and touches our soul.

Michael McMillan

Unpublished endorsement:  Poetry is a spoken art. Ronnie McGrath speaks-sings!-poetry with great authority. In the blazing tradition of The Last Poets, McGrath is a powerful performance poet. He’s also a wonderfully gifted sculptor-an artist of social consciousness; an artist on many, many fronts. Listen to him! He will inspire you.

Clarence Major