Epic of Cader Idris
If language is music, it is apt that a playlist is a poem. It makes even more sense in The Epic of Cader Idris, coming from Samatar Elmi, a poet whose concerns with the origins of things and the landscape of the margins are expressed in language so lyrical that you could almost miss its politics in its own music: "almost invisible, like the stencil of words / whispered at the front on a frosty morning," as he writes in [Etymologies]. Where Childish Gambino sings "the algorhythm is perfect," Samatar comes with The Algoriddim – after all, everything's better with a dancehall twist, even if snakes are “running rings / all around us”. As with his pamphlet Portrait of Colossus, this collection straddles the colloquial and the humorous, the philosophical and the mundane, always resonant with the quirks of a Yorkshireman of Somali heritage, one who knows the immigrant experience of modern Britain as intimately as he knows the cliffs and dales of his youth.
SAMATAR ELMI is a poet, PhD candidate, and international education consultant. Winner of the Poetry Society’s Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, his poems have appeared in journals such as Prairie Schooner, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Magma, and Iota. His work has also been anthologised in More Fiya (Canongate), Filigree (Peepal Tree), and After Plath (Nine Arches). Samatar’s début pamphlet Portrait of Colossus was a PBS 2021 Pamphlet Choice.