Selah

"In Selah, Jarrett interrogates what is lost when one seeks to shape something new - namely his black British identity - from disparate ingredients such as migrant parents, a religious upbringing and living in inner city London. His poetry dances an awkward shuffle as he negotiates and seeks to reconcile what he inherits from his Caribbean roots, what he has lost and who he is becoming on this British island. The poems are fraught with relationships shaped by a severing that creates a limbo where Jarrett states:

My body is a boulder, I try to sound out my new
national anthem: I am forever blowing bubbles - I remain stateless.

Here the poems are songs that testify, praise, lament and pray, drawing heavily on biblical imagery, mythology and language to score the relevant notes for his compositions. His elegiac pieces are epigraphic whether written for a diabetic dying grandfather or about the breakdown of a long-term relationship. This new black British voice is relevant and necessary."

Malika Booker