Quiet by Victoria Adukwei Bulley
Faber & Faber, 104pp, £10.99
The NS’s top poetry pick for 2022 is Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s debut collection, which is nominated for the TS Eliot Prize. In it, Bulley explores silence as a means of resistance, examines ideas of black interiority, and wonders how far one needs to let others “in” in order to be understood. She movingly renders these ideas in a letter to “little b”: “some might say you should be louder, bolder, tall./uppercase & camera-ready. but little b, you’re weary,/aren’t you, of being counted in the wrong kinds of ways”. In between sit Bulley’s affecting depictions of everyday moments: Essex schooldays; watching, from an inner-city train, as light “spills from the frame” of a skyscraper; “a streetlamp turning on at/dusk just as you pass it walking home”.
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