Her poetic meditations on migration have chimed with generations of readers. Alex Johnson salutes the genius of Grace Nichols

Travel certainly broadens the mind. Some time ago I found myself working on the Guyana section of an atlas for schoolchildren, tracking down statistics on rainfall and waterfalls, national birds and flowers, the natural attractions of the forested Potaro-Siparuni region and the urban delights of its capital Georgetown. And that’s when I came across Grace Nichols.

Nichols was born in Georgetown in 1950. The fifth of seven children, she grew up in a little village on the coast before moving to the city when she was eight. After working as a journalist and teacher she began writing poetry and fiction before moving to England in 1977, where she’s lived with her fellow poet and husband, John Agard, in Sussex ever since.

There isn’t a huge canon of poetry on the theme of idleness. John Clare has been perhaps the finest general explorer of its pleasures, and certainly individual works such as Robert W Service’s “Laziness” (“Oh it’s noble to sweat, pounds and dollars to get / But – it’s grand to do nothing at all”) remain in the mind. Any such list would certainly not be complete without Nichols’ collection Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman and other poems (1989), written while she was pregnant – her third book, following on from the award-winning debut I Is a Long-Memoried Woman (1983) and The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984).

Nichols’ work sits in the Wendy Cope and Stevie Smith zone, where dry wit can be found alongside piercingly perceptive insights. An early heads up of her playfulness is that, despite the collection’s title, there is no single poem in it called “Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman”. The nearest is the marvellous “The Body Reclining”, which is accompanied by a note, “With a thought for Walt”. While Walt Whitman prefers to sing the body electric, Nichols favours a more relaxed, recumbent, and frankly more comfortable position. “I sing the body reclining,” she writes, pointing out that: “Those who dust and dust incessantly also corrupt the body” and, she adds, consequently incarcerate themselves in a prison of their own construction.

The poem is littered with idler-friendly motifs, a “cushioned head”, a “lolling breast”, a “horizontal neck”. It also introduced me to a new term for the kind of indulgence on which readers of this magazine thrive, “liming”, which a Nichols footnote indicates is a “West Indian expression for standing around, idling away the time”.

Another favourite is “Grease”, which recounts how the substance gets everywhere in the kitchen, on the cooker, on the knobs, on the cutlery, on the tablecloth, ending with the conclusion that “Grease is obviously having an affair with me.”

Elsewhere, while the theme of idleness is not specifically explored, the small delights of everyday domestic life are very much to the fore, such as shaving (she refuses to take a blade to her armpits or bikini line), and a slightly rueful reflection about the childlike pleasure of collecting conkers and why adults seem to lose their delight “for gathering the magic shed of trees”.

It’s not a gag-a minute collection though. Lazy Thoughts has a sensual physicality running through it and doesn’t shrink from addressing key societal issues in poems such as “Spell Against Too Much Male White Power” and “Of Course When They Ask for Poems About the ‘Realities’ of Black Women”, which cover the kind of ground indicated on the tin.

Other pieces include observations on Caribbean migration. Coming to England and adapting to its ways is at the centre of “Wherever I Hang”, where the protagonist learns key English etiquette such as, “Never visiting nobody / Before giving them clear warning”. Referencing Marvin Gaye and Paul Young, the poem’s marvellous final line is, “Wherever I hang me knickers – that’s my home.”

Throughout, Nichols lightly mixes Creole with standard English, explaining that: “I tend to want to fuse the two tongues because I come from a background where the two worlds were constantly interacting.”

Nichols’ work appeals to children and adults alike: her poems have appeared on the GCSE English literature syllabus, and she was appointed Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020. She also won The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2021. Nichols has said of poetry, “It’s not going to change the economic system, but it can enrich, comfort and provide ammunition to go on living.”

Alex Johnson’s new book The Philosophy of Sheds will be published by the British Library in June.

This article is from Idler #108, March/April 2026.

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