SOURCE: “Poetry Gets the Last Laugh,” in Spectator, September 2, 2000, pp. 34-5.

In the following review, Scammell offers a negative assessment of Bloodlines.

The last big poem on black history was Derek Walcott's Omeros, which mixed up Homer with the textures of Caribbean life, and probably helped him to clinch the Nobel Prize in 1992. Some people thought it wonderful; others never got past the pomp and circumstance of the opening chapters. Fred D'Aguiar's Bloodlines takes its formal inspiration not from the epic but from the verse-novels of Byron and Pushkin, or so at least the blurb assures us: ‘Read this book fast like a novel, savour every word like a poem.’

It begins with the rape of a slave, Faith, by her white owner's son, Christy. This brutal act results, paradoxically, in true love, more passionate lovemaking, and in the pair's banishment by the outraged father:

‘My son, the...