Unmute: Young Voices from Lockdown: Edited by Kate Clanchy

by Kate Clanchy

An Anthology of Young Voices from the Lockdown of 2020. 'I met all the young poets in this book when they were even mostly when they were 11. They would come to my after school poetry workshops in Oxford Spires Academy, we would sit round the big table in the library, read contemporary poems, write our own, and share our work. The poets have grown up a lot as their biographies will tell you they have won dozens of poetry prizes, all of them are at least in the sixth form, and some are university graduates. But when the lockdown of 2020 came with its confusion and fear, we all longed for that secure space in the library. The poets got in touch with each other and with me, and we created an online poetry group to attend. No one sponsored us, and we were part of no we did it for love and for the joy of expressing some of the things that were happening to us. We were quarantined; we were frightened; we were baffled; we were ill; we were sequestered from touch; we were shut up with our families; we were shut up away from our families; we went through Ramadan and Easter without family gatherings; we witnessed the death of George Floyd; we raged, we demonstrated, we wondered; we longed. These were all national they were also the stories the group told each other each week in poems which amazed me because they were so accomplished and yet still so fresh and honest, so clearly the work of young people. Very often, I posted the poems on my twitter account, @KateClanchy1, and saw, from the thousands of retweets and likes, that many other people valued these despatches from the closed bedrooms of the young. As lockdown slowly eased, I gathered the poems together in this anthology. Like the group, this book is much more than the sum of its part, and was created for love, and for the joy of writing. We have printed some copies of this book mostly for family and friends. We are also putting it out in the world online so that its story can be shared when it is still fresh. Any proceeds of these sales will go to Asylum Welcome, a charity near our school in Oxford which has helped many of our school friends and their parents. We know the poems are certain to have other lives, to be read in schools and passed round on social media. We􏰀d be grateful if you asked us about paid reproductions using the information on page 2, but mostly, we􏰀re happy to be read and to become part of the ways people understand the lockdown, because trying to hold and understand our feelings, and having them heard in the world, was why we came together round our virtual library table in the first place.' - Kate Clanchy FRSL MBE All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review. The copyright of each poem is lent to the anthology but remains with the poet. All proceeds from this book go to Asylum Welcome, a charity assisting refugees and asylum seekers in Oxford.

Genres: Poetry

Kindle Edition

Published June 28, 2020

About the author

Kate Clanchy was educated in Edinburgh and Oxford University. She lived in London's East End for several years, before moving to Buckinghamshire where she now works as a teacher, journalist and freelance writer. Her poetry and seven radio plays have been broadcast by BBC Radio. She is a regular contributor to The Guardian newspaper; her work appeared in The Scotsman, the New Statesman and Poetry Review. She also writes for radio and broadcasts on the World Service and BBC Radio 3 and 4.

She is a Creative Writing Fellow of Oxford Brookes University and teaches Creative Writing at the Arvon Foundation. She is currently one of the writers-in-residence at the charity First Story. Her poetry has been included in A Book of Scottish Verse (2002) and The Edinburgh book of twentieth-century Scottish poetry (2006)

Reviews

[Emma Moyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible writing

I'm blown away by the voices in this anthology. This collection is among the best poetry volumes I've read. I want to give copies to everyone I know!

[Juliet Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kate Clanchy is a well known British poet, who works with young people. The poetry in this book comes from students in a class that met at a school in Oxford but during lockdown continued their poetry workshops online. Kate shared a lot of these poems on Twitter (if you're interested in poetry and you follow no-one else on Twitter, follow @KateClanchy1, the poems she shares from her students are amazing).

I had really enjoyed reading Kate's Twitter stream and once I heard about this book I was determined to buy it!

This is a book full of poems that are well written and truly felt. The poets come from a wide range of backgrounds and countries and bring their varied experiences into their work. These poems speak of inequalities, loneliness, family, culture and many other topics.

Lockdown is often the dominant theme of the poems, as in The Poem in Quarantine by Linnet Drury:

.....If this poem were autumn, it
would not be dry enough for leaf fights, if it were

spring the daffodils would be stars a little worse
for wear.

The boredom of lockdown specifically crops up, as does food, and both are combined in this line from Cooking by Mukahang Limbu:

Because time is a tuna sandwich
with some pickles and I am tired of it

Family is also a major theme, given that many of these poets have been spending a lot of time with their family during lockdown:

My mother
will always be
a language
I'll never understand.

from My Mother by Amaani Khan.

Lockdown is having a definite negative effect on people's mental welfare and that is evident in some of these poems, which address that issue

...It's been a long time
since I've done something
without asking if it will kill me.

from evening run by Annie Davison.

This is a brilliant anthology of poetry from young people, who are not just 'promising' but already talented poets who have interesting, vital things to say and who know how to write poetry.

Only a limited number of paperback anthologies were published (and I think have sold out) but you can buy Unmute on Kindle.

[Anthony Frobisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry that Resonates and Remains

A superb anthology of poetry collated by the wonderful Kate Clanchy. The voices of these young poets, some still in their teens, resonate and fizz with reality. The poems speak of now, the lived experience of life in lockdown Britain, with the insidious presence of Covid19. But they are more than that. The poems are rich, and vibrant, redolent of the experience of living in a society today, riven with division, the awareness of race and privilege, difference and indifference. The experience of the immigrant in Britain in 2020.
A superb and well selected anthology of some of the brightest young voices in British poetry. Highly recommended.

[David Shirk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely, haunting collection of poems by current and former students of Kate Clanchy, many of whom are immigrants, speaking from their experiences deep fear, pain, humanity and optimism.

Art is important, poetry is important, and this work is brilliant and tragic in the sense that there are countless untold poems waiting to find a home in a collection like this.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

This looked liked an excellent idea, well executed. Young people’s voices from Lockdown in an anthology of poetry put together on Zoom. I will have to read it again as soon as I buy another copy. My daughter liberated mine and won’t give it back.