Alfred Celestine died in London in 2009 at the age of 60. His work found only occasional publication during his lifetime, and always from small presses. This volume seeks to redress the balance and demonstrate the range of his work, using approximately a third of his total output to do so. As Jeremy Hilton said in a memorial feature in
Fire
magazine: "...when I heard [Celestine] read in London in 2007, ...I knew I was in the presence of a major, but little-recognised and little-published, poet. What struck me about him was a combination of his powerful use of language, the depth of emotion underlying the linguistic strictness, and his drawing on history, his own personal struggles and the way these interweaved with the struggle of black people as a nation to find their roots and their contemporary forms of expression. All this powerful stuff was, in Al Celestine's work, finding expression through a continuation of the modernist mode...."
"...what I most want to say about Al Celestine is that he was one of a number of fine poets scattered around London... who wrote calm, quotidian, intensely personal poetry that was also thereby political. And that, like a number of other poets, he was unjustly little read and yet had the guts and the courage, as well as the su ciency of what it is to be a poet to write on and on, through thick and thin. He was a very good poet." -Stephen Watts
"II love the way [Alfred Celestine's] poetry works, its strange music and its emotional power... ere's a lot of history in it, a lot of literary allusions, and a lot of his personal life. It is deeply sensuous and muscular too." -Christopher Gutkind
"...the moon scythes in and out of [Alfred Celestine's] poetry, sometimes reflecting, sometimes black. is stu isn't an achievement - the word belittles it. It's real." -Keith Jebb