Footprints - Softcover

Peter Blackman (1909-1993) was one of the early pioneers of Black-British poetry. Although his work has been unavailable for many years, he was once a major figure in radical Caribbean politics and culture in London. His friends included Paul Robeson (with whom he visited the Soviet Union in 1949), Nazm Hikmet, W.E.B. Du Bois and George Lamming. In the 1950s, the composer Alan Bush set part of Blackman's 'My Song is for All Men' in his cantata Voices of the Prophets. In 1980, the ex-Soft Machine drummer Robert Wyatt recorded Blackman's poem 'Stalingrad' on the flipside of Stalin wasn't Stallin'. Footprints contains four long poems, 'My Song is for All Men', 'Stalingrad', 'Joseph' and 'London', plus a short elegy to Claudia Jones, Blackman's friend and comrade and the founder of the Notting Hill Carnival. Footprints is a book about empire and racism, resistance and struggle, from Korea to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. And it is a book about liberation, from Stalingrad to London.