Gold from the Stone: New and Selected Poems
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By Lemn Sissay
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Lemn Sissay was seventeen when he wrote his first poetry book, which he hand-sold to the miners and millworkers of Wigan. Since then his poems have become landmarks, sculpted in granite and built from concrete, recorded on era-defining albums and declaimed in over thirty countries.
He has performed to thousands of football fans at the FA Cup Final, to hundreds of thousands as the poet of the London Olympics, and to millions across our TV screens and the airwaves of BBC Radio. He has become one of the nation’s best-loved voices.
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This is a compilation of poems from the poet’s previous collections and so shows his development as a writer. The title expresses the important clue – from his early awful experiences as a child and adolescent he has created an outstanding range of ability as a writer of poems, plays and scripts for radio and television. The poems are wonderful – they make an immediate connection and speak to the reader of transformations of potential trauma into understanding and hope. The language is sometimes lyrical, sometimes urgent and direct. Sissay is first and foremost a performance poet and the poems come over very powerfully when spoken aloud. A poem he wrote on becoming Chancellor of Manchester University, called Inspire and be Inspired, contains the lines:
Open all doors.
Open all senses.
Open all defences.
Ask, where were these closed for?
“It’s about opening up all the dark places that have been closed,” says Sissay. “That’s what we’re doing here.”
