Birmingham’s former poet laureate Roy McFarlane launched his second collection on Thursday – National Poetry Day – at the Birmingham literature festival. The Healing Next Time, which has been published by Nine Arches Press during Black History Month, contains interwoven sequences on institutional racism, deaths in custody and a life story set against the backdrop of Birmingham at the turn of the millennium.

Roy McFarlane was born in Birmingham of Jamaican parentage and has spent most of his years living in Wolverhampton. He is the editor of Celebrate Wha? Ten Black British Poets from the Midlands (Smokestack, 2011). His first full collection of poems, Beginning With Your Last Breath, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2016.

PHOTOGRAPH: JACK NELSON