Picasso, I Want My Face Back

Art, landscape, and memory are interwoven strands in the fabric of Grace Nichols' latest collection, Picasso, I Want My Face Back. The book opens with a long poem in the voice of Dora Maar, who, as Picasso's muse and mistress, was the inspiration for his iconic painting, The Weeping Woman. The poems are almost interlocking reflections that echo the cubist manner of the painting and allow us to enter the shifting surfaces of Dora Maar's mind and her journey of self reclamation.

Peter Forbes - Contemporary Writers

Grace Nichols came to Britain from Guyana at the age of 17 and she has carried the warmth of her Caribbean sensibility through many a cold English winter. Her poems celebrate sensuality and generosity and attack petty mean-spiritedness - Deeply Caribbean in sensibility, she writes sensitively of other traditions, especially Africa and India.

Born in Guyana, Grace Nichols has lived in Britain since 1977. Her first collection, I is a Long Memoried Woman (1983) won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Her later poetry collections - published by Virago - include The Fat Black Woman's Poems (1984), Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman (1989) and Sunris (1996), along with numerous poetry books for younger readers, including Come on into My Tropical Garden (1988), Give Yourself a Hug (1994), Everybody Got a Gift (2005) and Startling the Flying Fish (2006), poems which tell the story of the Caribbean. Her latest collection Picasso, I Want My Face Back (Bloodaxe Books, 2009) will be followed by her Selected Poems from Bloodaxe in 2010, on the occasion of her 60th birthday. She lives in Sussex with the poet John Agard and their family.