Poetry / poems by individual poets

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Book SynopsisJames Hartnell is a poet. This is not what he does, this is just who he is. These are not simply songs of submission, they are beautiful songs to submit to.Trade Review"Submission? Nothing submissive about this collection - it's an acute commentary on the present state of the world. This is a collection to savour." -Rod Riesco; "This collection hums with a quiet energy that repeatedly draws us back to the reality that we're here for a brief journey. We really need to savour the moment." -Dave Morgan; "These skilfully crafted poems, that utilise a range of sources, are a celebration of the everyday." -Helen Kay; "Songs of Submission exalts life in a trillion hues. An elegant, funny, lyrical collection." -Harvey Vasey; "Some of the poems will make you smile others will sadden. All will make you ponder and all you will enjoy!" -Kathryn Brown; "A superb collection of poems by a writer in his prime. There are elements of passion, anger and humour. It is a book to be read again and again, giving rewards and new insights every time. Buy this book - you won't regret it." -Paul Blackburn

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Book SynopsisWritten daily throughout the UK's restrictions to combat coronavirus, Nail on the Head takes us from the anniversary of the first lockdown, through the easing of regulations, and up to our grand reopening on so-called 'Freedom Day'. Humorous, compassionate, and with a principled, political edge (and more than a passing interest in the European Football Championships, as you'd expect from the National Football Museum's poet-in-residence), this is Paul's fourth and concluding documentation of a nation's resolve and wellbeing. Illustrated by Chris Riddell OBE (Children's Laureate / Observer), Korky Paul (Winnie and Wilbur / Sir Scallywag) and Martin Chatterton (Winter of the White Bear / Bluenoses). “A fresh collection of Cookson’s verse. If it’s laughter you’re after you could do worse.” - Dr John Cooper Clarke, poet / “Pithy blinders, heartfelt and moving, marvellously inventive and original … quite brilliant. When looking at the national landscape, its wounds and doughty perseverance generated by its grief besieged citizens, Paul Cookson is their sparse voice, their collective bewilderment and courage.” - Stewart Henderson, poet / “Paul Cookson is a special poet. He is a human being. Rare in this game.” - Mike Garry, poetTrade ReviewPraise for volumes 1, 2 & 3: "Every day should have a Paul Cookson moment - keep him by your bedside for emergencies." - Simon Mayo, broadcaster & author; "Paul Cookson is on the ball with poetry and life in the here and now. These trying times need poets to help us find a compass. This book is a must." - Michael Rosen, poet & author; "A book that future historians will want to read; it will tell them what it was like to live in turbulent times through a poet's eye. If journalism is the first draft of history, then here is the second: life shaped, structured, described, annotated." - Ian McMillan, poet & broadcaster; "Paul manages to season his cogent observations of COVID-19 with a dash of humour that makes you want to dip in again and again." - Valerie Bloom MBE, poet & writer; "Witty and wise, astute and acerbic." - Tony Walsh AKA Longfella, poet; "This book takes you on a corollacoaster of emotions, but don't worry, with Paul you are in safe and well-washed hands." - Henry Normal, poet, writer, TV & film producer; "When we look back at 2020/21 and think what was all that about? his work will help us to remember and to see how far we've come." - Rev. Kate Bottley, priest & broadcaster; "A sublime collection of instinctive and honest poems that will serve as a poignant and definitive record of a challenging, turbulent year." - Badly Drawn Boy, singer-songwriter

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Book SynopsisRoderick Watson is a poet of introspection and retrospection. In the rich distillation of his language, the images of a remembered picnic, a Tuscan encounter, an out-of-date postcard, a holiday cottage - all these assume an iconic intensity in the quiet deliberation of this verse. Roderick Watson is a poet who ponders rather than postures. Each one of these poems, in his accomplished Scots as well as in English, is a pleasure to read, to re-read and to remember. -- Philip HobsbaumTrade ReviewRoderick Watson is a poet of introspection and retrospection. In the rich distillation of his language, the images of a remembered picnic, a Tuscan encounter, an out-of-date postcard, a holiday cottage -all these assume an iconic intensity in the quiet deliberation of this verse. Roderick Watson is a poet who ponders rather than postures. Each one of these poems, in his accomplished Scots as well as in English, is a pleasure to read, to re-read and to remember. PHILIP HOBSBAUM

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Book Synopsis"Limestone" is the epic poem of Barbados (porous limestone island), and a major achievement in the development of an indigenous Caribbean poetics. Drawing on the Barbadian folk music of Tuk, Anthony Kellman invents his own form of Tuk verse to write the story of his island from the destruction of the Amerindians to the present day. In part one, the verse is based on the three-line tercet form of the early Tuk song. This section uses both invented characters and actual historical persons such as Bussa and Nanny Grigg, the leaders of the 1816 slave revolt, to explore the epic of loss, survival and reinvention in the lives of the African slaves. The verse form of part two is based on the vocal melodies of the contemporary Tuk song, rhymed couplets in tetrameters with occasional improvised or 'picong' breaks. This section is set in the post-emancipation period up to 1987 when Barbados had reached twenty-one years of independence. Through the voices of those who lead the struggle against colonialism - Samuel Jackman Prescod, Charles O'Neal, Clement Payne, Grantley Adams and Errol Barrow - Kellman explores in a series of dramatic monologues the inner anguish of these popular leaders over the slow pace of advance and the inevitable compromises with external power. And as the society becomes increasingly polarized in terms of class and wealth, and the queues of would-be emigrants at the American consulate lengthen, the island, always the central character of the epic, asks: when a White business class still dominates the economy, who has benefited from the people's struggles of the past? What has been the fate of the 'children' of Bussa and Nanny Grigg? The verse form in part three is based on the rhythmic patterns of the seminal instrument in Tuk music, the snare drum. This section is set at the end of the twentieth century and tells the stories of Livingston, a young musician, and Levinia, an Indian-African Barbadian schoolteacher who has migrated to Georgia, USA. Their stories explore the complex relationship of contemporary Barbadians to their homeland: deep attachment and an equal frustration over the absence of opportunities. Though Livingston and Levinia meet only in the most fleeting way, their lives intertwine in signifying that the island and its people still nurture within them the dreams of freedom and self-fulfilment. "Limestone" has a truly epic sweep. It narrates countless stories and creates many different voices to construct a vision of Barbados that encompasses suffering and achievement, heroic struggle and the setbacks of born of self-interest and timorous compromise. Like the great epics of Homer and Virgil it connects images of the past to contemporary dilemmas. Above all, "Limestone" is never other than a poem: a vast treasure house of images, sounds and rhythms that move, entertain and absorb the reader in its world.

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Book SynopsisAt first a casual reader might think that Brian Chan was a private poet of the inner self, but that is not the case. For him, acts of inward reflection, intimate communication, the gestures and institutions of human solidarity and the affairs of state are all indivisibly connected. He sees people torn between the need to reach out, because to live alone is 'too heavy a reminder of the soul's slightness' and the temptations to corral within safe boundaries, to fall into the tribalism of nostalgia for 'one mother-tongue or the investment of cowards'. For Chan, such tensions bedevil both human societies and such intimate relationships as marriage. Concerning the latter, for instance, he celebrates most movingly what remains after 'every flood and dove of our heart's peaked ark' but also writes of 'the cage that even the most sacred contract could not but spore'. He writes as a Guyanese (this 'mudcrab') living in the prairies of Canada, where the 'wind's scythe slashes in a dark scar through screams of grass', who has left 'one tribe behind', who, in search of a 'free state' has felt the need to escape colonies 'abandoned to a mess/of incestuous whispers and stunned tributes to indifferent ghosts', who has lived closer than most to the rages of an ethnically divided society where he has seen 'the numbness of his drunken brothers bent/on raping one another's sisters'. But Chan retains of vision of people who 'know all their lives are a web/of interlocked spreading circles', and the dream of a 'a kind of home' with its 'promise of binding of all coals/into one flame as strong as each coal's dying'. At the heart of Chan's obliquely political vision is the conviction that 'all is given to be handed on', that miracles can happen if they are 'not erased by a collector's itch to own them to dust'. He stares into an abyss of numb, meaningless emptiness, rages against the cages, but keeps faith with love and pride in his 'brave human comrades' who keep like faith.

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Book SynopsisDelores Gauntlett's poems give a real sense of what it means to be a contemporary Jamaican in 'this hard country', a land 'spinning on the edge of nerves', where 'shocking news is the norm'. Mostly alluded to, this Jamaica of dread is directly approached in a number of poems: a brother held at gunpoint, where it is the mental wounds that sap , or in the careful euphemisms of describing the mother unable 'to rise from the day/of her son's affliction at the boot of authority'. Her collection also bears witness to what enables Jamaicans to endure, the ties of love, friendship and family, though here too she writes without sentimentality of the prisons that people make for themselves and the fragility of such ties. But Gauntlett is much more than a reporter of tribulations. Hers is a concern with 'the code-breaking edge of thought', with the capacity of the poem to get inside the 'thisness' of being, to demand reflectiveness as 'each phrase's after-image/ trails in the mind to be later held to the light', or to return down old lanes with new understandings.Delores Gauntlett is Jamaican. Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and journals including [i]The Caribbean Writer[/i], [i]Poetry News[/i], [i]Kunapipi[/i], [i]The Observer Literary Arts[/i], and [i]The Jamaica Journal[/i].Trade Review'These are poems of fierce compassion and elegiac sorrow; but their greater distinction lies in the way that, in them, the particular and the transient are always widening out, like ripples from a thrown stone, into aspects of the universal and eternal. If Gauntlett's poetry is profoundly consoling, that is not because it averts its gaze from human suffering, but because it dignifies and anneals it.' - Wayne Brown

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Book SynopsisEarl McKenzie was born in rural Mount Charles, St. Andrew Jamaica in 1943. He attended Oberlin High School and Mico Teachers College. Then he lived for some years in the USA and Canada where he obtained a BA and MFA from Columbia University and a Ph D from the University of British Columbia. In Jamaica he taught in several high schools and at Church Teachers College. He currently lectures in Philosophy at the University of the West Indies, Mona. In addition to his poetry in 'Against Linearity' (Peepal Tree, 1993), he is the author of the novel, 'A Boy Named Ossie: A Jamaican Childhood' (Heinemann, 1991) and 'Two Roads to Mount Joyful & Other Stories' (Longman, 1992). His work has appeared in the following anthologies: 'Caribbean New Wave'; 'The Faber Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories' and 'Perspectives'.

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Book SynopsisThough they traverse the wider Caribbean and beyond, Heather Royes' centre of gravity is always Jamaica ('No exile -small sabbaticals') which arouses in her both love and exasperation. Ancestors - a nomadic family 'wandering up and down the islands', family and place are described with a painterly, compassionate eye for telling detail. The collection contains a generous selection from her first, now out of print book of poems, The Caribbean Raj.Heather Royes was born and raised in Jamaica. She works as a consultant in HIV/AIDS and as a poet.

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Book SynopsisVelma Pollard has developed a significant following among her fellow Jamaicans and in the wider Caribbean world. In this collection she will delight these -- and new readers -- with her capacity to unite the personal and the political in a seamless whole. Organized into three sections, the collection explores underlying political concerns, such as the impact of global culture, the dangers of unobstructed American power, and the threat of Islamist opposition. The poems move beyond these problems, however, ultimately seeking resolution through understanding the flow of nature and urging a celebration of life.Velma Pollard writes poetry, fiction and studies of language. She was born in Jamaica and works at the University of the West Indies where she is Dean of the Faculty of Education.

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Book SynopsisCarib's Leap brings together work from a dozen previous collections, and major new poems including those on the Big Drum Dance of Carriacou, poems that are alight with almost forty years of imaginative involvement with the Caribbean.Laurence Lieberman is an American poet with deep Caribbean affiliations. He has published twelve collections of poetry and three volumes of literary essays.Trade Review"His is a poetry of such awe, a nearly orthodox Romantic ecstasy, that is verges on the plangent... Leiberman's poems look and act like Marianne Moore's syntactical precessions mated with Roethke's nervous green world of passion. He has the grace to make his voyage into the eye of the world and back a communion for the reader." Dave Smith, 'American Poetry Review'. "There's a remarkable sensibility guiding these poems, an inquisitiveness, a strong sense of humor and compassion. Lieberman's really is a singular achievement. His subjects, his style and syntax, his syllabic lines and cascading stanza -- all are impossible to imitate or mistake for anyone else's... At sixty, he has become one of our truly indispensable poets." Thomas Swiss, 'The Southern Review'. "In purpose and effect, Lieberman's writing is without boundary. Indeed, it's hard to name a more distinctive and original American poet working today." G.E. Murray, 'Chicago Sun-Times' "Laurence Lieberman is perhaps the finest American poet writing in patterned free verse form. The style is sensuously narrative and descriptive. It exudes joy and vitality... a true American original." Charles Guenther, 'St.Lous Post Dispatch'.

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Book SynopsisIn "After-image", Dennis Scott displays in ever more refined, pared-down ways the qualities that, in his previous collections, established him as a major Caribbean poet. There is his acute intelligence, seriousness worn lightly, and meticulous craft with sound and the appearance of the poem on the page. There is his resolute integrity as a Black and Caribbean poet with a sense of multiple inheritances who refuses to be conscripted into any sentimental or monolithic stance, who goes 'among the fashionable drums/trying to keep true my own blood's subtle beat'. There is the warm humanity of his poems about love and the nourishment of his marriage. There is his actor's ability to get under the skin of those he observes, to see 'so many tales/ in every silent face', his sense of the masks and rituals, the significance of tiny movements in the interactions between people. Particularly arresting in "After-image", poems drawn from the wealth of manuscripts left by Scott after his untimely death in 1991, and edited by his friend and fellow poet, Mervyn Morris, are those that focus on his own coming death, his hope/confidence that 'when this machine is dead/ the poems it made will flare/ wild...' These are poems vibrant with life, with curiosity about this new journey, 'a certain satisfaction from/ questions articulated', poems of an inspiring courage. Though the world becomes confined to a ward, a body, a tirelessly curious mind, there is no sense of diminution when a vase of flowers on a hospital table brings him 'The surprise of wild flowers!/ Walls fall open, roofs melt/ I too grow upwards.' There are the pleasures of travelling light, 'A small bird, bearing/ news from the front', and the pangs and consolations of not knowing what is to come. He sees the bird that 'shits on my neat/ green/ garden// I do not know/ what will grow', but he also draws peace from the sense of continuation when he watches the ocean and thinks 'Let the sea repeat/ unwatched, its long, salt hymn.' And, there is his poet's wit writing about death the editor in the last poem in the collection, the last two lines left artfully incomplete, of waiting on 'that blue hand that/ could be here, now'.

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Book Synopsis"Fauna" is not just a collection of individually rewarding poems but a carefully structured whole. Using metaphors drawn from the fauna and flora of Jamaica and images drawn from painting as the over-arching devices, Bishop explores the tensions between plenitude and emptiness, presence and absence, the nourishing and the poisonous in her memories of the rural Jamaican childhood that has shaped her. There is the lushness of scene, but also the way that 'the smell of mango' will always be associated with childhood trauma, or the richness of avocado contrasted with the allamanda who admits, 'Everything alive develops a defence...Mine is poison; all parts of me are toxic'. There are imagined scenes that are highly focused and there are the blurred images of the father who is always at the edge of the photograph. And from the perspective of New York, Bishop sees herself as another kind of fauna, the Jamaican birds who can be found everywhere. 'In North America three or four species/have been identified from the peculiar way they sing.' This is a moving and heart-felt collection, but Bishop never allows the siren voice of longing for return to become sentimental. Always there is the drive towards the artist's desire to remake the world and to work meticulously at what can be left in, what must be taken out.Trade Review"To render the familiar strange and new again is the task of gifted poets. Jacqueline Bishop's poems do this in wonderful ways. She calls upon powerful sources, including world mythology, her own Jamaican ancestry and her full-woman experiences to create these fabulous, shining songs of innocence, loss, birth, rebirth, wit and wisdom. Good job Miss Jacqueline!" -- LORNA GOODISON, author of 'Controlling the Silver'

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Book Synopsis'First Rain' is a spirit journey to pull together a 'necessary, fractured past', a poetic record of a struggle towards wholeness. In the first part, 'Bush Roots', Weir-Soley recovers her ancestral past in a series of narratives and dramatic monologues that give a living, breathing portrayal of a Jamaica that is gone, but whose parable-speaking elders still offer a guide to survival. Whether from actual memory, the fragments of family story, the clues from photographs or from a dreaming imagination, Weir-Soley presents a grandfather's 'dutty-tuff' vision, a grandmother's 'bush magic', the practical, gruff goodness of Uncle Miguel, the car mechanic who teaches generations of boys useful skills, who she sees as Ogun, a 'lesser god/for a greater good', and many others. These are people she makes you regret not having known, but grateful that she shares them. It is a world built up in careful detail, a complex, nuanced world that contains both neighbourly solidarity, but also the dividing gradations of class, skin-colour and occupation; a world where women can be treated as beasts of burden, where 'outside' children suffer emotional abuse, but where men like her uncle are shown behaving with great tenderness towards children. Against the solidity of this world, part two, 'Exiled Musings', contrasts the nightmarish, temporariness of Caribbean migrant life in the USA, a people 'orphaned from our homes'. Here, Weir-Soley brings the realities of the travails of young black men with the law, black on black violence, crack and HIV/Aids into sharp and often angry focus. But in the final parts, 'Heartwars' and 'Incantations', we see the struggles to rebuild family and respect, and the capacity for joy and sensuality, the resilience and spirituality of a people who never lose their sense of God's grace.

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Book SynopsisThose who have followed Anson Gonzalez's career will imagine they know his evolution from the engaged poet of the political turbulence of late 1960s, early 70's Trinidad revealed in Score, to the confessional poet who adopted the persona of a Caribbean Don Juan in The Love-song of Boysie B., to the contemplative poet of spiritual exploration in Moksha: Poems of Light and Sound and Merry-go-round and Other Poems. In this new Collected Poems, along with a number of important new poems, Anson Gonzalez carefully disrupts such expectations by an arrangement that mixes poems from across the decades. What this rearrangement reveals are consistencies of concern and approach, whatever the period. There is a compunction to truth-telling, however uncomfortable; there is a constant state of tension between the desire for involvement in the world (with the adoption of a prophetic voice to excoriate all that is unsatisfactory in it), and an attentiveness to the unbidden inner voices that speak of separateness and alienation; there is also an alertness to moments of unlooked for joy (and anguish) most often found in family and fatherhood. Above all, the poems speak of the impossibility of writing poems that do justice to the promptings that inspire them. In the process, Anson Gonzalez reveals himself as an everyman, an intensely Trinidadian man and a writer dedicated to the demands of art with his finger on the pulse of both the state of the nation and the state of the inner man.Anson Gonzalez is a Trinidadian poet, critic, publisher and encourager of countless writing careers.

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Book Synopsis"Impossible Flying" is Dawes' most personal and universal collection, 'telling family secrets to strangers'. There are moments of transcendence, but often there is 'no epiphany, just the dire cadence of regret' since the failures of the past cannot be undone, and there is no escape from human vulnerability, the disappointment of hopes, bodily decay and death. From that bleak acceptance comes a chastened consolation, and as for poems, 'they are fine and they always find a way to cope/they outlast everything, cynical to the last foot.' The family secrets focus primarily on the triangular relationship between the poet, his father and younger brother, though in "For Mama" there is a heartfelt and deeply moving acknowledgement of the rocklike unconditionality of a mother's love and care for her family's wounded souls. As ever with Dawes' collections, the rewards come not only from the individual poems, but also from their careful arrangement, internal conversations and from the overarching meanings that emerge from the architecture of the four sections. "Legend" begins the exploration of family mythology and the special place of the youngest brother and the hubristic hopes invested in him. "Estimated Prophet" gives context to the process of the brother's descent into madness and their father's collapse into despair and premature death in the condition of Jamaica in the 1980s when cold war politics and tribal wars brought an end to the dreams of the socialistic 70s, 'that valiant, austere decade'. Here the comic vision of the first section cannot be sustained in writing about 'those chaotic seven years of dust'. This section also deepens the counter-discourse of self-reflection on the act of writing the poems: the confessions of impersonation ('I have stolen much...') and the ambivalent space between history and myth in the filtering of memory and constructed family narratives. The third section, "Brother Love" is set in the present and deals with the renewal of relationship with the brother and the guilty respite of being away 'from the long lament', with marriage, children and 'the peace and constancy/of new homes, while old homes seem/to crumble about us.' The last section, "For My Little Brother" explores the difficult dialogue between these two worlds, between a past that is unalterable and a present that is shaped by it, but that contains its own possibilities. "Impossible Flying" is deeply felt writing that has an intensity and tautness which, if not new in Dawes' work, rises to new levels of eloquence. It is impossible to read this collection without feeling that one's consciousness of what it means to be human has been immeasurably deepened, or without wanting to constantly return to the poems.

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Book SynopsisRaymond Ramcharitar's sophisticated and formally ambitious poems have Trinidad as their centre but are global in scope. This is reflected both in their subject matter and their form. The regular movement between the Caribbean, Europe and North America that several of the poems chart is seen both as a contemporary reality, and as no more than a continuation of history's patterns: of, for instance, Indo-Trinidadians who are the 'scions of waylaid Brahmins and pariahs'. This particular migration is placed in the context of a wider world of human movement and 'new theologies springing from old longings'. In form, too, the poems refuse to be confined by any limiting sense of the contemporary and the Caribbean. Use of the archetypes of classical mythology, traditional verse patterns (such as the villanelle) and the careful, confident use of rhythm and rhyme are the most evident outward features of Ramcharitar's concern with form. There are homages to Derek Walcott and Wallace Stevens, but the closer one's acquaintance with the poems, the more evident that Ramcharitar's post-modern voice is a thoroughly individual one, with a capacity for writing verse narratives that are condensed but reverberate like the best short stories, dramatic monologues that skilfully create other voices, and lyric poems that get inside the less obvious byways of emotion.Raymond Ramcharitar was born in Trinidad. He worked as a journalist and is the author of a controversial and provocative study of the deficiencies of the Trinidadian press, Breaking the News: Media & Culture in Trinidad.

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Book SynopsisJohn Robert Lee brings a quiet, reflective, often autobiographical approach to his concerns with Caribbean life, art and faith. Within carefully crafted formal structures – and some experimentation with traditional forms – he finds the space to give his voice and persona free rein. Whilst rooted in St. Lucia and Caribbean culture, he takes the whole world as his arena – as much at home writing about Boston as Castries.Undoubtedly the foremost Caribbean Christian writer of his generation, his is a truly incarnational view of faith, anchored in the reality of human experience and expressed in richly textured images of Caribbean landscapes, dress, street life, music, dance and his native Creole language. "Robert Lee has been a scrupulous poet, that's the biggest virtue that he has, and it's not a common virtue in poets, to be scrupulous and modest in the best sense, not to over-extend the range of the truth of his emotions, not to go for the grandiose. He is a Christian poet obviously. You don't get in the poetry anything that is, in a sense, preachy or self-advertising in terms of its morality. He is a fine poet."Derek Walcott.John Robert Lee is one of the group of significant Saint Lucian writers who are the younger contemporaries of Nobel laureate Derek Walcott.

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Book SynopsisWhile on assignment for the Virginia Quarterly Review to report on the impact of HIV/AIDS on Jamaica, Kwame Dawes could not prevent himself from writing poems in response to the stories he heard. In a way journalism is not designed to do, these poems pare away detail to reveal the truths of character and situation, and find forms which both give expression to and find a kind of perfection for fleeting, difficult lives. These poems became, in time, this, his fourteenth collection of verse. Powerfully illustrated by Joshua Cogan's photographs, the art of Dawes's poems makes it impossible to see HIV/AIDS as something that only happens to other people, and to marginalise their lives. Here, the experience of the disease becomes the channel for dramas that are both universal and unique, voices that are archetypal and highly individual – stories of despair and stoicism, deception and self-honesty, misery and joy in life.Kwame Dawes is widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of the post-Walcott generation. He currently holds the position of Distinguished Poet In Residence and Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina.

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Guyana Prize Caribbean Award 2011 (Poetry).This is an immensely ambitious collection of poems, the fruit of more than a dozen years' work since the publication of Mark McWatt's Guyana prize-winning collection The Language of Eldorado in 1994 (his first collection Interiors won the Commonwealth Poetry prize in 1989). Strands of autobiography, a deeply sensuous ecology of place, historical narratives; the inner world of imagination and the often difficult realities of the postcolonial nation are interwoven in the collection's bold but carefully worked out architecture.The four parts of the book represent at one level linear phases of a life: childhood; adolescence and young manhood; maturity and the first intimations of ageing. Within each section there is an intersecting narrative sequence that sometimes complements, sometimes expands and sometimes run counter to the 'personal' narratives. In 'Mercator', poems in the voice of a nameless Elizabethan sea captain searching for Eldorado intertwine with semi-autobiographical poems about a boy's discovery of self and world in the remote northwest district of Guyana. In 'The Dark Constellation', poems about love and awakening sexuality are connected to a series of poems about Guyana's vast and powerful rivers. 'The Museum of Love' features a wholly imaginative narrative about the restless spirit of a young black boy, murdered by a plantation manager, who inhabits a sculpture in a museum and with his ragamuffin followers wreaks havoc on the works of art during the night. This is intercut with a sequence of poems on the theme of independence in life and politics, poems that reflect on the contrary impulses of creation and destruction. The final section 'Le Repentir' (which is the name of the main cemetery in Georgetown), explores a historical (and true) story of an accidental fratricide and the themes of guilt and expiation. This narrative connects to poems about mid-life and thoughts about old age and death.Mark McWatt is the recently retired Professor of West Indian literature at UWI, Cave Hill. He is joint editor of the Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse(2005).

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Book SynopsisThese poems by Millicent Graham have a compactness and economy that belies the complex and expansive range of emotions and considerations that occupy her imagination. Graham's poems offer us a way to see her distinctly contemporary and urban Jamaica through the slant eye of a surrealist, one willing to see the absurdities and contradictions inherent in the society that preoccupies her. These are poems about family, about love, about spirituality, about fear and mostly about desire, where the dampness of things is as much about the humid sensuality of this woman's island, as it is about her constant belief in fecundity, fertility and the unruliness of the imagination. For a poet publishing her first collection, Graham's sense of irony, and instinct for surprise and freshness in image are remarkably mature and sophisticated. But it is the sharpness of image and the precision in her use of language that announce the arrival of an extremely talented poet: 'I am the curve set straight/ by a guava switch, the proof/ that love can make you flinch.' Graham knows the tradition of Caribbean poetry, and is deeply aware of the value of both homage and resistance. The result is a wonderfully executed balancing act that ultimately suggests a newness of sensibility and imagination. In The Damp in Things, we are invited into the unique imagination of Millicent Graham, and we find ourselves in a world of psychological density and liveliness, and a space of sharply honed intelligence that remains strangely light and alert because of her slanting wit and off-kilter humour.Millicent A. A. Graham was born 1974 in Kingston, Jamaica. She has recently been published in City Lighthouse Poetry Anthology 2009; Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts and Letters, Vol 5 No 1, 2008 and The Caribbean Writer Vol. 17.

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Guyana Prize for Literature 2011.These poems written over the past thirty years, but most of them recently, have as their focal point an act of homage to the great Guyanese poet Martin Carter, voice of a nation. They celebrate a friendship and an example of vision and integrity, and bear witness to Carter's role as the nation's conscience in Guyana's continuing agony of disputed elections and ethnic divisions. Dense and jewelled, the poems also investigate the numinous power of words and the necessity and sanctity of the act of making. With half a dozen striking line drawings, these poems create a surreal twist on the everyday and reveal a profound artist's ecological vision of the relationship between the senses and the correspondences between man and the natural world. The poems are quirky, philosophically enquiring but have the concreteness of thought rising like 'pond-bottom bubbles'.Stanley Greaves was born in Guyana. He is one of the Caribbean's most distinguished artists and an accomplished classical guitarist. He currently lives in Barbados.

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Book SynopsisShe Who Sleeps With Bones was named a 2009 Jamaican bestseller in Jamaica Gleaner 'Local books did it big in 09'.In Tanya Shirley's She Who Sleeps With Bones, the hauntings of memory and the spiritual lead us to eloquently shaped epiphanies that turn what appear at on the surface to be simple and tidy stories into profound meditations on the human condition. Shirley acts as a witness to the lives of those around her, yet she is a biased witness, one who has become so enmeshed in the lives of her 'characters' that gradually we become convinced that she has erased the lines that would allow us to distinguish her from the people who enter her work. The collection is anchored by a series of spiritual poems that beautifully enact the mysteries of inner sight and clairvoyance of a poet who is a reluctant seer, who comes from a family of seers. Her reluctance arises from the toll that sight brings to the poet - the burden of feeling, and speaking the truths that haunt. And yet for all its spiritual intelligence, these are poems of earthy sensuality and celebratory humor that are fully rooted in the every day details of living, loving, fearing, laughing and hoping. Shirley's poems are beautifully crafted and they reveal her deft handling of syntax and musicality. She is as meticulous in her choice of words and images as she is in her honesty of emotion and risk-taking. Ultimately, however, it is the resilience of her joy that remains with us after each poem - for all its complications, (and there are many explored here - deaths of dear friends and relatives, the anxieties of being an alien in another country, the perils of unrequited love, the importance of size in sexual play, and the premonitions of tragedy) the world is ultimately full of wonder and joy for Tanya Shirley, a joy that she manages to make sublimely contagious.Tanya Shirley was born and lives in Jamaica. Her work has appeared in Small Axe and The Caribbean Writer and in New Caribbean Poetry: An Anthology (ed. Kei Miller, Carcanet, 2007.)

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Book SynopsisIn this collection, the uncertain paths of childhood and adulthood are traced through a sequence of poems that treat Idlewild--a place deep in the heart of rural Jamaica--as a character, a constant that serves as a reliable touchstone for memory. Although the majority of the poems are centered on themes of security and pleasant memory, the edges are haunted with truths of rupture in family relations, abandonment, loneliness, resentment of unreliable men, and the challenges of maintaining faith through difficult times. Balancing nostalgia for the past with an acute awareness of the present--the poverty, violence, class divides, and racial complexities of modern day Jamaica--the central voice of the poem matures along with the subject matter to gradually unveil a well-formed poetic voice with an authoritative command of form and language.

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Book SynopsisThis collection of work by the late Neville Dawes (1926-1984) gives unrivalled access to his thoughts on a rural Jamaican childhood, his exposure to Oxbridge modernism, and his involvement in nationalist ferment, and the frustrations of postcolonial politics.The book makes available the fine poems that Dawes wrote, mostly between 1950 and 1970, both as the young man in London exploring a modernist voice and as the ideologically-committed poet returning to his roots. Fugue also includes the celebrated short stories broadcast on the BBC's Caribbean Voices programme, along with pieces of insightful and humorous autobiography and a section devoted to his critical writing. A long introductory essay by Kwame Dawes brings both a scholar's studied contextualisation and a son's moving insight.Neville Dawes was born in Nigeria in 1926, but grew up in rural Jamaica. He studied for an MA at Oxford, taught in Jamaica, Ghana and Guyana, and was later appointed Director of the Institute of Jamaica. He wrote two novels, The Last Enchantment, reissued by Peepal Tree in 2009 as part of their Caribbean Modern Classics series, and Interim. Always a Marxist, he was deeply immersed in Africa and his nationalist identification with the rural Jamaican working class.

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Book SynopsisJacqueline Bishop is the founding editor of "Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts & Letters." She lives in New York City.

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Book SynopsisWinner of a Casa de las Américas Prize 2010, one of Latin America's oldest and most prestigious literary awards.The jury said the collection "captures a sense of the complexities of historical, social and cultural aspects of contemporary Caribbean".Jennifer Rahim's poems move seamlessly between the inwardly confessional, an acute sensitivity to the distinctive subjectivities of an immediate circle of family, friends and neighbours, and a powerful sense of Trinidadian place and history. Few have written more movingly or perceptively of what can vex the relationship between daughters and mothers, or with such a mixture of compassion and baffled rage about a daughter's relationship to her father. If Sylvia Plath comes to mind, acknowledged in the poem 'Lady Lazarus in the Sun', the comparison does Rahim no disfavours; Rahim's voice and world is entirely her own. There is in her work a near perfect balance between the disciplined craft of the poems, and their capacity to deal with the most traumatic of experiences in a cool, reflective way. Equally, she has the capacity to make of the ordinary something special and memorable.Here is no self-indulgent misery memoir, not least in its compassion and involvement with other lives. The threat and reality of fragmentation – of psyche's, of lives, of a nation – is ever present, but the shape and order of the poems provide a saving frame of wholeness. Poem after poem offers phrases of a satisfying weight and appositeness, like the description of the killers of a boy as 'mere children,/ but twisted like neglected fields of cane'.Jennifer Rahim is Trinidadian. She also writes short fiction and criticism. She is currently Senior Lecturer at The Liberal Arts Department, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad.

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Book SynopsisA retired fisherman, Monty Cupidon, encounters a naked, bloodied and traumatised woman standing at the cross-roads. He offers comfort and takes her in. Suffering from amnesia, she cannot tell him anything about herself. The only clues are the signs that she has once worn a wedding ring, has a butterfly tattoo and red nail polish on her toes. In the absence of memory, he names her Esther. So begins a remarkable sequence of poems that explores many dimensions of liminality. Back of Mount Peace occupies a space between lyric and narrative, between reflection and story. It explores the space between body and mind, making Esther's halting discovery of her self through her body, which like a tree bears its indelible history and, unlike the mind, 'doesn't forget its grievances', work both as moving narrative device and a deeply sensed and sensual reminder of the physicality of existence. Above all, this is a sequence that explores a relationship which begins in a primal Edenic space of innocent discovery in which, as Monty hopes, 'the hallelujah's of new love will begin', but which, like all relationships must enter history, the decay of time and the corruptions of knowledge. In the use of rhyme and other patterns of sound, Back of Mount Peace shows an exceptional delicacy of formal control that constantly reinforces the poem's insights and moving conclusions.Kwame Dawes is widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of the post-Walcott generation. He currently holds the position of Distinguished Poet In Residence and Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina.

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Book SynopsisUsing the power of language to explore and discover patterns of meaning, this stunning and ambitious collection brings the lyric poem face to face with the external world, with its politics, social upheavals, and ideological complexity. Whether it is a poem about a near victim of the Lockerbie bombing reflecting on the nature of grace, a president considering the function of art, or a Rastafarian defending his faith, the selections all seek illumination and understanding in the world. Using images from Garcia Marquez's novels, accounts of slave rebellions, passages from the Book of Ezekiel, the art of modernist painters and wall-to-wall news coverage, Dawes creates a striking series of poems that are about finding pathways of meaning, and the quest for love and faith.Kwame Dawes was born in Ghana in 1962 but grew up in Jamaica. He is widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of the post-Walcott generation. A poet, actor, editor, critic, musician and professor of English, he is the author of 17 books. He was awarded a Pushcart Prize for Poetry in 2001. His poetry collections include Progeny of Air (Peepal Tree, 1994), winner of the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, Shook Foil: A Collection of Reggae Poetry (Peepal Tree, 1997) and Map-Maker (Smith/Doorstop, 2000), winner of the The Poetry Business Prize. His New and Selected Poems, 1994-2002 was published by Peepal Tree in 2002. He recently edited the acclaimed anthology Red: Contemporary Black British Poetry (Peepal Tree, 2010).

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