Weightless Word

Alfred Celestine died in London in 2009 at the age of 60. His work found only occasional publication during his lifetime, and always from small presses. This volume seeks to redress the balance and demonstrate the range of his work, using approximately a third of his total output to do so. As Jeremy Hilton said in a memorial feature in Fire magazine: "...when I heard [Celestine] read in London in 2007, ...I knew I was in the presence of a major, but little-recognised and little-published, poet. What struck me about him was a combination of his powerful use of language, the depth of emotion underlying the linguistic strictness, and his drawing on history, his own personal struggles and the way these interweaved with the struggle of black people as a nation to find their roots and their contemporary forms of expression. All this powerful stuff was, in Al Celestine's work, finding expression through a continuation of the modernist mode...."