Memory & Time
Memory & Time — Overview
These three poems explore how memory shapes identity and how the passage of time transforms our relationship with the past. Louisa Adjoa Parker, Caleb Femi and Raymond Antrobus each use different techniques to capture what is handed on or held on to — a trade, a memory, a phrase.
Louisa Adjoa Parker — “The Jewellery Maker”
Parker, a writer of English and Ghanaian heritage, draws a close portrait of a real craftsman. The poem is not an extended metaphor but a study in small detail: the man makes jewellery “like his father before him, and his father too”, so the trade itself is inherited.
The first stanza builds his world through the senses — “a plate-blue sky”, “heat-baked stone”, “the slap of sandalled feet”. In the second he “sits straight-backed” like “a surgeon”, his tools “neat as soldiers”. The third turns quieter: his wife wears one “plain” piece, “worn thin”, while he dreams of “fine-spun gold” for her.
The poem holds two lives side by side: the beautiful things the man makes, and the money he does not have. Parker’s focus on tiny details matches his trade, and the last line — “warming the metal his hands caress” — hints that the jewellery may mean more to him than to whoever buys it.
Key techniques: Parker uses sensory imagery, simile and precise technical vocabulary from the workshop. The three stanzas separate parts of his life; free verse and enjambment suit the flow of his work, while frequent caesura keeps interrupting it.
Context: Parker writes about people whose stories are usually left out. The poem never names the country, so the man stands for skilled workers everywhere whose craft earns other people more than it earns them.
Caleb Femi — “Thirteen”
Femi, a British-Nigerian poet and the first Young People’s Laureate for London, writes about being stopped by police at the age of thirteen and mistaken for a man. Written in the second person, the poem is closer to an elegy for a lost sense of safety than a fond memory of youth.
The title’s simplicity is deceptive: “Thirteen” is the age the speaker keeps repeating because nobody will believe it. Femi grew up on the North Peckham estate in south London, and the poem sets a police officer’s school-assembly promises against a boy “cornered” in the street.
Femi’s poetry is rooted in the urban landscape of south London estates. He presents these spaces not as stereotypical deprivations but as complex, alive environments full of community and creativity alongside genuine risk. “Thirteen” captures the moment a boy learns that his own street reads him as a threat.
Context: Femi uses photography alongside poetry, and his work has a cinematic quality — each image is carefully composed. His poem captures thirteen as both universal (everyone passes through it) and specific (shaped by race, class, and geography).
Raymond Antrobus — “With Birds You’re Never Lonely”
Antrobus, a d/Deaf poet of English and Jamaican heritage, explores connection and communication through the image of birds. The title is a line the speaker hears from a young Maori woman in New Zealand, who learned it from her grandfather — a phrase passed down, then passed on again.
For Antrobus, whose deafness shapes his relationship with the world, birds are a form of communication that runs past spoken language. In the forest he turns his hearing aid off and is “tuned / into a silence that was not an absence” — a liminal state between the human and natural worlds.
The poem is built from connections: a stranger reading about trees in a coffeehouse, a forest heard with the hearing aid switched off, a woman who can name each bird by its call. The last image is of London’s trees, “grey” and without family — a quiet warning about what cities lose.
Key techniques: Antrobus uses aphorism (the title as a piece of inherited wisdom), couplets that mirror two things connecting, and the interplay between sound and silence that characterises much of his work. His poetry often explores what can and cannot be heard.
Connections Between the Poems
All three poems explore how memory selects and preserves particular moments or images. Parker holds a whole life inside one working day. Femi fixes a single afternoon that changed how a boy sees his own street. Antrobus shows how a phrase learned from a grandfather can travel to a stranger.
Each poet has a different relationship with time. Parker shows a trade handed down “like his father before him”. Femi freezes one afternoon at thirteen and lets it stretch across a life. Antrobus shows words outliving the man who first said them.
A useful comparison: all three poets are concerned with what survives. For Parker, a skill survives, passed from father to son. For Femi, fear survives — the memory of being “cornered” at thirteen. For Antrobus, a sentence survives, carried from a grandfather to a stranger.