This is dub poetry: bold and musical, funny and furious.

This collection brings together the work of nine inventive and brilliant poets who defined and drove the dub poetry genre. From the Caribbean, Canada and the UK, the poetry in this collection spans forty years, as dub became a powerful cultural and creative force.

With roots in the reggae culture of 1970s Kingston, dub poetry uses the vivid expressions of everyday spoken language to describe and challenge the experience of life on the margins. Early dub poetry took on police violence, slums and poverty. Later, as Caribbean migrants arrived in countries like Britain and Canada, dub poets faced new issues: racism, discrimination and hostility. Over four difficult decades, dub gave marginalised people a voice for their anger, defiance and creativity. It was the soundtrack to post-Windrush culture.

Serious and humorous, alive and urgent, here is the very best of dub poetry.

The poets included in this collection are: Oku Onuora, Mikey Smith, Mutabaruka, Jean 'Binta' Breeze, James Berry, Benjamin Zephaniah, Ahdri Zhina Mandiela, Lillian Allen and Afua Cooper.

The Verandah Poems was both a departure and a return for Jean 'Binta' Breeze, who left her village in Jamaica to become an internationally renowned Dub poet and storyteller. This is a book of coming home and coming to terms, of contemplation rather than contention - of mellow, musing, edgy poems drawn from the life and lives around her. It was Breeze's first new collection after Third World Girl: Selected Poems (2011), and was published on her 60th birthday. Foreword by Kei Miller. With photographs by Tehron Royes.

Jean 'Binta' Breeze was a popular Jamaican Dub poet and storyteller whose performances wee so powerful she was called a 'one-woman festival'. Her poems are Caribbean songs of innocence and experience, of love and conflict. They use personal stories and historical narratives to explore social injustice and the psychological dimensions of black women's experience. Striking evocations of childhood in the hills of Jamaica give way to explorations of the perils and delights of growth and change - through sex, emigration, motherhood and age. Introduced by renowned critic Colin MacCabe, the book brings together new poems with poetry and reggae chants from four previous collections: Riddym Ravings, Spring Cleaning, On the Edge of an Island and The Arrival of Brighteye. Many of the poems are included on the accompanying DVD featuring two Jean 'Binta' Breeze performances filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce at Leicester's Y Theatre, plus an interview with Jane Dowson.

Jean 'Binta' Breeze was a popular Jamaican Dub poet and storyteller whose performances were so powerful she has been called a 'one-woman festival'. The Fifth Figure is a book-length sequence mixing poetry and prose which chronicles the lives of five generations of Caribbean and Black British women of mixed ancestry. Part novel, part poem, part family memoir, its structure is based on the Jamaican quadrille, a hybrid version of the dance brought from Europe by the island's former colonial masters. Beginning in the late 19th century with her great-great grandmother's first quadrille, Breeze tells a many-layered tale of love and betrayal, innocence and suffering, hardship and joy over a hundred years as each mother sees her daughter join a dance that shapes her life. The Fifth Figure was her sixth book, and saw Breeze breathing new life into the dramatic monologue. Steeped in the history of Jamaica, the book develops the possibilities of narrative, voice and rhythm, offering an eloquent and empowering vision of Caribbean lives and culture. In 2011 Bloodaxe published Jean 'Binta' Breeze's Third World Girl: Selected Poems, a DVD-book selection of new and previously published work with live performances on the accompanying DVD. This does include work from The Fifth Figure, which remains available as a separate edition, nor the later collection, The Verandah Poems (2016).