Burning Bright

Day 3 Sealey Challenge 2022 ‘A Blood Condition’  (Chatto & Windus, 2021) by Kayo Chingony.

This constrained, restrained, brilliant poetry about devastations is written so carefully and deeply it feels like it should be carved into the earth as memorial, elegy, witness and protest.  Human emotion is held so firmly in its forms that the reader cannot come away from ‘A Blood Condition’ without a sense of the aftershocks of grief. It is a book about origin, dislocation, ancestry, class, the ongoing traumas of colonisation, love, language, grief, illness, and the unease of living in a human body.

I had the good fortune to hear Kayo Chingonyi read from this collection in Liverpool earlier this year for the Matt Simpson memorial reading at Liverpool HOPE University but I am only just sitting down today to engage with the book itself.  

I defy any reader to get to the end of ‘Guy’s and St Thomas’s’ (pp.18 –19) and in remain in one piece. This is the first poem to make me cry since I encountered Robert Hayden’s ‘Those Winter Sundays’ about ten years ago and poems as rare as this stay with you all your life. 

How to lift this mist

from my eyes, that I might see

this concrete and glass 

for what it is and stop

writing my mother into it

that I might let her walk away

becoming smaller and smaller 

until she disappears.

The ‘Blood Condition’ of the title is HIV/AIDS, although it is also a metaphor for the human condition, for historical and current black trauma, and suffering. While the poems document origins and myths of the HIV virus they also explore the raids, invasions and plunder of colonial destruction in Zambia, exploitation and ‘life given over to capital’ (p.6). 

I love this description of the writer’s life:  ‘this wandering/ to speak in far off rooms.’ (p.26).

Chingonyi’s attention to form, lineation, sound and rhythm are all exemplary.  One example is the Meredithian sonnet dedicated to Tony Harrison, ‘Postcard from the Sholebrokes’ (p.30) where we glimpse today’s version of the lads from Harrison’s ‘V’:

pouring a sip for departed bredrins

lost to the brief imposition of blades;

or jailhouse; or another city’s grey

skyline, better because of its distance;

hitting the books; or freestyling fictions

to big up their chests.  They ride for their ends

on quad bikes and pushbikes this circle of friends.

This book doesn’t need my endorsement. My observations here are brief and inadequate.  

‘A Blood Condition’ has been shortlisted for major prizes.  It is an important and brilliantly written book about illness, loss and belonging. I will go back to it.  I don’t know if it is a great book, but I do know it is written by a great poet.