What is postcolonial poetry? How is it like or unlike the postcolonial novel, postcolonial theory, and other related genres? What paradigms are most fruitful for interpreting it? To approach these questions, a bald synopsis of models for the analysis of, and recurrent themes within, postcolonial poetry may be a useful place to begin, before embarking on a more extended discussion of postcolonial poetry in the context of other genres with which it fuses, and against which its specificities can be tracked. For the purposes of this chapter, ‘postcolonial poetry’ means poetry written by non-European peoples in the shadow of colonialism, both after independence and in the immediate period leading up to it, particularly works that engage, however obliquely, issues of living in the interstices between Western colonialism and non-European cultures.

Decolonization has been a primary paradigm for conceptualizing postcolonial poetry, as made possible by critical works such as Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993), Chinweizu, Onwuchekwu Jemie and Ihechukwu Madibuike’s Toward the Decolonization of African Literature (1980), Kamau Brathwaite‘s History of the Voice (1984), and Robert Young’s Postcolonialism (2001). Decolonization movements swept across much of Asia, Africa, Oceania, the Caribbean and elsewhere, particularly from the time of Indian and Pakistani independence in 1947 through the 1970s, the period when British, French, Belgian, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish and other modern European colonial powers relinquished control over most of the earth’s surface.

'Wherever I hang me knickers - that's my home', declares the Guyanese- British poet Grace Nichols. Immersed in the sensory present of London and yet vividly remembering her former life in the Caribbean, she gives utterance to a diasporic sensibility, 'divided to de ocean / Divided to de bone'. Her poem enacts these split affinities in code-switching between Guyanese Creole ('me knickers') and Standard English ('my home') and shuttling imagistically between the Caribbean's 'humming-bird splendour' and London's 'misty greyness'. What are the implications of such ocean-splayed, register-shifting poetry for how we understand the relation of poetry to place? In modern and contemporary poetry studies, place is often conceived as either indefinite and abstract, or determinate and highly particularised. Modernist poetry, for example, has normally been understood as arising out of the shocks of modernity, wherever collisions between tradition and modernisation have arisen. At the same time, regionally defined poetries - e.g., the poetry of Northern Ireland or the New York school - are often seen as springing from the soil of a specific location. Yet neither the Aeolian model of poetry as airborne and placeless nor the Antaean model of poetry as drawing strength from a particular earthly plot is adequate to the poetry of geographic and cultural displacement - a poetry of multiple and mobile 'positionings', in Stuart Hall's term. In this chapter, I explore postcolonial and especially black British poetry as translocal - that is, as poetry that reconceives and remaps widely disparate geocultural spaces and histories in relation to one another, particularly in this instance metropolitan Britain as seen by migrants from its former colonies.

Readers of a book on modernist poetry may be surprised to find in it an essay on the English-language poetry of the so-called developing world. W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Jean Toomer - yes, no doubt. But the Jamaican Louise Bennett, the Nigerian Wole Soyinka, the Kashmiri Agha Shahid Ali? Surely to call these poets 'modernists' would be to commit what philosophers call 'a category mistake', to misattribute properties, to confuse classifications? Or perhaps, as Monsieur Jourdain in Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme didn't realise he had been speaking prose all his life, have these 'Third World' poets been modernists all along without being noticed?

Geography helps explain this appearance of a category mistake. Anglophone modernism - conceived as a literary response to the anonymity, stress and speed of modern life - is usually attributed to 'First World' cities from London and Dublin to New York and Chicago. Way off the canonical map of English-speaking modernism are the colonial outposts of European empires, except as sites from which adventurous poets and artists are seen as importing primitive or exotic materials to shore against their ruins.

A second reason for the seeming oddity of critically conjoining modernism and postcolonialism is historical. Most period-based conceptions of literary modernism locate it in the first half of the twentieth century, and postcolonial poetry, so called because of its emergence during and in the aftermath of European colonialism, flourished for the most part in the second half, post the post-Second World War decolonisation of these regions.