The protracted war waged by police forces against black communities in Britain is chronicled in Linton Kwesi Johnson’s poetry. “Everywhere you go you hear people say / That the Special Patrol them are murderers,” writes Johnson in his “Reggae fi Peach.”

Focusing on the relationship between Johnson’s political activism and his verse, David Austin’s Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution provides an illuminating intellectual portrait of the man and his times. Austin situates the poet in a literary and intellectual tradition of postwar black European and Anglophone cultural production. The central figures within this milieu are Amiri Baraka and his modernist conception of blues poetry; Bob Marley’s parallel reshaping of reggae for new audiences; and the philosophical interpretations of black experience in the writings of C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire.

This wide-ranging approach to Johnson’s work opens up ways of reading his poetry into the wider currents of which it was a part. Instead of standing out as a lone figure within an English tradition of verse, Austin is able to place Johnson in the tradition that Paul Gilroy has termed the “black Atlantic.”