84/2020. The most recent collection of poems by Guyanese-British poet Grace Nichols, with a scattering of black and white photos by Compton Davis of the old wooden buildings of Georgetown the capital city of Guyana.

Preface: "One of the things we do as poets, is to try to preserve experiences, people, places important to us, in an effort to save them from time's erasure."

And those are the themes of this collection: childhood in Guyana; home in Sussex; revisiting Georgetown but with no ghosts to lay to rest; and praise poems for friends. Nichols appears to have reached a comfortable point in her life and the lack of tension in most of these poems reflects her achievement, but some of the people she's written praise-poems for are no longer among the living, and the river delta land of Guyana is under threat from climate change with some of the Dutch-colonial city of Georgetown built on reclaimed land as much as eight feet below sea level (the old buildings in the accompanying photos all conspicuously have their main living rooms above ground level). The author knows development of recently discovered offshore oil resources could change Guyana beyond recognition.

There is also the music of this accomplished poet's carefully chosen forms, with a sonnet sequence that worked especially well for me, and some outstanding images: "shooting stars of black tadpoles" being both literal pollywogs and symbols of the children who grew and changed and moved away.

If you appreciate Grace Nichols' work then you'll like this but I wouldn't say it's the best place to meet her for the first time. ( )