Instagram poet serves up broth of dizzying emotion in one of this year’s must-reads
Yrsa Daley-Ward is no stranger to grit and guts. Her beguiling collection of poetry, Bone, was a breathtaking exercise in brevity, often landing emotional gut punches with fewer than a dozen words. More recently, Daley-Ward has been labelled the “model poet of Instagram” — one of a growing cohort of writers like Hera Lindsay Bird, Kate Tempest, Warsan Shire and Rupi Kaur.
And in The Terrible, Daley-Ward’s taste for visceral, raw verse shows no sign of letting up. If anything, her singular style has been honed since 2014’s Bone; she appears to have found even more of an emotional grasp of her life’s chaotic journey.
And what a journey it has been. Born in England to a Jamaican mother and a Nigerian academic, the young Yrsa (right) was shuttled to live with her highly religious grandparents at seven.
In her grandparent’s house, Coca Cola is “drugs”, while pork is seen as an unclean meat. Church happens all day, every Sunday.
At 11, Yrsa and Little Roo move back in with her mother, into a chaotic and messy house, where a string of men come and go as though in a revolving door. The Terrible is the account of an uncertain and disordered childhood, but also reveals the dark secrets that Daley-Ward has kept down the years. After experiencing depression as a pre-teen, there was a journey to come to terms with her sexuality.
Yet in tandem to this grim and unsettling awakening, the young Yrsa is also aware of the power she exudes to the adult men around her. She discovers drugs; there is a spell working in the sex industry as a lapdancer and escort.
Daley-Ward moves seamlessly from style to style, recalling some scenes from her life in the form of a play, others as six-line poems. In the hands of a lesser writer, the overall effect could border on the grating, or even the gimmicky.
Still, there are so many flourishes of imagination and pathos here, that it’s impossible not to get caught up in the torrential pace of the narrative.
One suspects that Daley-Ward could write about even the most banal moments of her day and make it sound exhilarating.
Add in an extraordinary life like hers and a life examined from all sides at that and the result is one of the year’s genuine must-reads.