The Lost Chronicle: 2004-2009

by Polarbear

Polarbear is one of the most influential poets of his generation. The work collected here is the work that made his name. These poems have racked up hundreds of thousands of views online, lodging themselves in the hearts and minds of readers and audiences alike. His particular gift is for the many kinds of music a line can contain. He marries the intricate, compulsive, rhyming strategies of rap with the schanachie's gift for telling a story and the saxophonist's flair for bending the possibilities of sound.

Genres: Poetry

208 pages, Hardcover

Published November 10, 2022

Reviews

[Emīls Ozoliņš · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked the book a bit of a whim.
By which I mean I had seen it in the shelf for at least two years, then finally decided to buy it with a gift card. Didn’t know anything about it. Midway, as I wanted to log it into Goodreads, I saw it had 7 reviews and a 3.57 average.
So either I’ve messed up or found a gem.
Think it’s more the latter. There is something strangely appealing in this sort of overt British male poetry for me - like Lucas Jones, and maybe even Ren and rappers as well - that just speaks to me deeply. It’s brutal, honest, rhymed and all the lot. And it’s good. And it’s kind of how I write sometimes without even knowing it.

[Juliano · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I ain’t never been eloquent / all I’ve ever been into / is trying to write real / life down”. In The Lost Chronicle: 2004-2009, poet and spoken-word artist Polarbear collects twenty pieces he wrote during those years, performance poems that made his name. There are many moments gleaming with his love for music, from ‘Sagat’, which is about discovering that love, from Kate Bush to the hip-hop that ended up defining his own work, to ‘Compton’, which finds Polarbear plumbing the depths of personal memory and social history in his love and need for music: “whatever mess I’m getting in / to feel better I just / press play”. He writes about performance, embracing it despite the small-town narrow-minded (“Where I come from it rains a lot and / grown men still get called by their / playground nicknames a lot / day to day / it don’t change a lot and if / you wanna leave / they think you’re strange”), a reckoning with origins: “and just like that he was gone / the guy who helped me put my Batman suit on / rode off to where we were from”. Poems like ‘Scotch’ have great shining moments of humour, and other pieces overflow with clear insight: “breathing / and reading / not needing a purpose”; “hindsight is a bully”; “first thing / you must observe the time”. And I love the imagery, from “freight train fights between us we leave / sparks / and keep scars on clean hearts” to “A sky full of endings / each star a full stop” in the excellent ‘Front Step. Part-artefact, this exciting time-capsule collection concludes with an illuminating conversation between Kayo Chingonyi (poet and editor) and Polarbear, on craft and how his life and heritage inform that.

[Cat Caie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Spoken word in the written form doesn't work for me but the storytelling was good (I just also didn't entirely enjoy the story it was telling)