The Tracks of My Name

Grace Nichols embarks on a journey across the English countryside to Olney in Buckinghamshire. Olney was where the one-time English slave-trader (later abolitionist) John Newton lived and wrote his famous hymn, Amazing Grace, which inspired her Guyanese Methodist parents to name her Grace Olney after both hymn and place.

The Tracks of My Name sees Grace Nichols embarking on a journey across the English countryside to the small town of Olney in Buckinghamshire. Olney was where the one-time English slave-trader (later abolitionist) John Newton lived and wrote his famous hymn, Amazing Grace which inspired her Guyanese Methodist parents to name her Grace Olney after both hymn and place. A narrative sequence that reads as a personal quest, The Tracks of My Name lyrically and imaginatively explores the relationship between memory and history, conscience and greed, as well as a sense of place and love of landscape, through her own distinctive way of viewing the world. Elsewhere she continues the interweave between her Guyanese/Caribbean and British heritages, striking a more celebratory note with poems that draw from her various cultures. And as the ocean lashed its leviathan tails and Wind wailed like a chainsaw carried by drowned slaves, John Newton, the self-confessed blasphemer, began to pray The Tracks of My Name is Grace Nichols's fourth new collection with Bloodaxe since her retrospective, I Have Crossed an Ocean (2010), following Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009), The Insomnia Poems (2017) and Passport to Here and There (2020). She was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry for 2021. Her poetry is studied in UK schools as part of the GCSE National Curriculum.