Coming of the Little Green Man
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John Agard has been broadening the canvas of British poetry for the past 40 years with his mischievous, satirical fables which overturn all our expectations. In The Coming of the Little Green Man, his eighth Bloodaxe collection, we enter a world of play and parable – in which the little green man stands for all pesky outsiders – in provocative poems charged with contemporary resonance. Which box should the little green man tick on the question of identity? Will the little green man survive as a minority of one in a multiracial London? What if the little green man volunteers to give blood to 21st-century humankind? Winner of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, he brings to bear his trademark trickster wit that bridges the metaphysical and the political, the comic and the poignant, the oral and the literary. His Alternative Anthem: Selected Poems (2009) was followed by Travel Light Travel Dark (2013) and Playing the Ghost of Maimonides (2016).
Poet, performer, anthologist, John Agard was born in Guyana and came to Britain in 1977. His many books include eight from Bloodaxe, From the Devil’s Pulpit (1997), Weblines (2000), We Brits (2006), Alternative Anthem: Selected Poems (2009), Clever Backbone (2009), Travel Light Travel Dark (2013), Playing the Ghost of Maimonides (2016) and The Coming of the Little Green Man (2018). He is the winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry for 2012, presented to him by The Queen on 12 March 2013. He won the Casa de las Américas Prize in 1982, a Paul Hamlyn Award in 1997, and a Cholmondeley Award in 2004. We Brits was shortlisted for the 2007 Decibel Writer of the Year Award, and he has won the Guyana Prize twice, for his From the Devil's Pulpit and Weblines. The Coming of the Little Green Man is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. He lives with the poet Grace Nichols and family in Sussex; they received the CLPE Poetry Award 2003 for their children’s anthology Under the Moon and Over the Sea (Walker Books).