SOURCE: “Thames Barriers,” in New Statesman & Society, November 12, 1993, pp. 37-8.

In the following excerpt, Burnett offers a generally positive assessment of British Subjects, though she notes that some of poems in the volume “do not earn their place.”

The peculiarly British ambivalence about black cultural expression is well summed up by topical events. On the one hand, the South Bank Centre and the Arts Council are staging Out of the Margins, a celebration of British black and Asian writing. On the other, the government has announced that it is to close down the Commonwealth Institute by turning off the funding tap from 1996. With funds already reduced to little more than a trickle, the Foreign Office policy has starved all areas of the institute's work over the past decade. Yet that work has heroically continued to nurture the cultural climate in which such events as the South Bank festival...