Earth Colours 1970-2000

Earth Colours (which comes with a valuable critical preface by Mark Pirie) collects for the first time the very best of L E Scott's poetry from his 30-year career to date.

'L E SCOTT's poems have got soul. His poems are an African-American poet's testament - eloquent, urgent honest - to survival in the late twentieth century. They range in subject from the pervasive racism he experienced growing up in America, to coping with the trauma of having been a soldier during the Vietnam War, to the struggle for equality and justice in South Africa, to the problems and joys of ordinary life in New Zealand.

'Lewis Scott is a rider on the freedom train and his poems take us on his journey. His pointed, politically-charged language has a raw immediacy. It dances and sings with a staccato rhythm, an urban beat, a jazz lyricism. These are poems of autobiography, expressing an emotional intensity - grief, or anger, or wry acceptance. These are affirmative action poems. The story they tell revisits places of marginalisation, places of oppression, but the poems themselves speak out against intolerance with skill and often humour. They enlarge our understanding about colour consciousness.