Publisher's Synopsis
Linton Kwesi Johnson has been a pioneering figure in black poetry and music. He coined the phrase "dub poetry", and went on to develop it into a gutsy musical idiom. He has performed throughout Britain, Europe, America and the Caribbean with musicians including Rasta Love, the Dub Band, Dennis Bovell and Shake Keane. Much of the work from this book can be heard on LKJ's albums - with bass and percussion thudding to the reggae rhythms of the poetry - including his CD Tings an' Times. As well as new poems from this album - some of them written in response to the fall of totalitarianism in Eastern Europe - the book includes work from his three previous collections, Voices of the Living and the Dead (1974), Dread Beat An' Blood (1975) and Inglan Is a Bitch (1980). Tings an Times charts the progress of our times with poems about racism, race riots, radical politics, police oppression, black youth and black Britain. It includes the classic LKJ poems 'Five Nights of Bleeding', 'All We Doin is Defendin', 'Sonny's Lettah' and 'Di Great Insohreckshan', as well as powerful new poems like 'New Cross Massahkah', 'Mi Revalueshanary Fren' and others which live up to the title of another LKJ statement in music and poetry, Mekkin Histri.
