Poetry / poems by individual poets

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Book SynopsisWhen they first began to appear in the 1930s, George Campbell's poems blasted through the colonial Victorianism of contemporary Jamaican poetry. Dubbed 'the poet of the revolution' by Jamaica's founding political father, Norman Manley, Campbell was the one Caribbean poet whom Derek Walcott acknowledged as an inspiration.Campbell wrote about the struggle for independence and the appalling social conditions that drove the Jamaican masses to revolt, and about the rising consciousness of black Jamaicans after centuries of oppression. He wrote out of a consciousness of history and religious faith, a faith in which, for him, Jesus and Lenin were not incompatible icons. He also wrote about love, its ecstasies and bitter disappointments, and some of his very best poems are luminous celebrations of Jamaica's natural beauty.George Campbell was born of Jamaican parents in Panama in 1916 and lived variously in Columbia and Costa Rica before returning to Jamaica. He became intensely involved in the nationalist movement and with the Manley family, who championed the poetry he was beginning to write. First Poems appeared in 1945. In the same year, Campbell migrated to New York, where he worked in theatre and dance. In 1978, he returned to Jamaica, working as a consultant to the Institute of Jamaica and the People's National Party archives. In 1994 he returned to New York, where he died in 2002.

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Book SynopsisWayne Brown's On the Coast was first published in 1972. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in the UK and established Brown as one of the finest young poets of the post-Walcott generation. It was followed in 1988 by Voyages, a collection that amply showed the maturing of Brown's remarkable gifts but was rarely available. Now, long after some of the 'revolutionary' poets are forgotten, it is possible to see that Brown's work has been seminal in Caribbean poetry, both for its intrinsic qualities, and for Brown's crucial role as the mentor of a current generation of Caribbean poets. This edition restores the original text of the 1972 edition and adds the new poems first published in the later collection.Wayne Brown's poems approach the issues of creativity, finding meaning, finding contentment and the threats to these human goals through poems about Caribbean nature (his bestiary of sea creatures makes him a Caribbean Ted Hughes); through anecdote, frequently drawing on family life; through poems about favourite artists such as Neruda, Nabakov, Rilke and the Tobagan poet Eric Roach; through reflecting on the rewards and pain of remaining in the Caribbean compared to the loss suffered by those writers and artists who left the islands.Best known as one of the Caribbean's most incisive commentators, Wayne Brown raised a weekly newspaper column to a literary art. Between 1984 and 2009, some 3,500 editions of his column In Our Time appeared in Trinidadian and Jamaican newspapers

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Book SynopsisChristian Campbell takes us to dusk, what the French call l'heure entre chien et loup, the hour between dog and wolf, to explore ambiguity and intersection, danger and desire, loss and possibility. These poems of wild imagination shift shape and shift generation, remapping Caribbean, British and African American geographies: Oxford becomes Oxfraud; Shabba Ranks duets with Césaire; Sidney Poitier is reconsidered in an exam question; market women hawk poetry beside knock-off Gucci bags; elegies for ancestors are also for land and sea. Here is dancing at the crossroads between reverence and irreverence. Dusk is memory, dusk is dream, dusk is a way to re-imagine the past.Running the Dusk won the 2010 Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was shortlisted for the 2010 Forward Poetry Prize for the Best First Book in the UK. It was also named a finalist for the Cave Canem Prize by Sonia Sanchez."Running the Dusk gives us a new voice for Caribbean arts and letters, and Christian Campbell is one of the few perfectly suited to accept this mantle. His poems don't address the obvious in a tumultuous, beautiful landscape of hearts and minds, personal and public rituals, but his voice dares to take a step beyond, to bridge the diaspora of the spirit. If you're holding Running the Dusk in your hands, you are lucky to be facing the gutsy work of a long-distance runner who possesses the wit and endurance, the staying power of authentic genius. This first collection is controlled beauty and strength, and the exhilaration of images and music encountered are necessary and believable. There's great celebration here."Yusef Komunyakaa, Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet and Global Distinguished Professor of English at NYU"A truly auspicious debut by a brilliant young writer of wide-open ear and versatile tongue. Campbell's imagery slices through fog; these poems are nourished by New World etymologies and old-school ways and wisdoms. His use of poetic form is drum-tight and yet these poems unfold like the infinity of a coast-line, sinuous and generous. In the black diaspora Campbell writes from and about, 'all angels have afros' and all poems are song. Running the Dusk is deep-souled, keen-eyed, knowing, honed, gorgeous. This is a heralding book we'll be talking about for a long time to come."Elizabeth Alexander, Obama's Inaugural Poet and Chair of African American Studies at Yale UniversityChristian Campbell studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. His poetry and essays have been published widely in the Caribbean, the United Kingdom and North America.Trade ReviewRunning the Dusk gives us a new voice for Caribbean arts and letters, and Christian Campbell is one of the few perfectly suited to accept this mantle. His poems don't address the obvious in a tumultuous, beautiful landscape of hearts and minds, personal and public rituals, but his voice dares to take a step beyond, to bridge the diaspora of the spirit. If you're holding Running the Dusk in your hands, you are lucky to be facing the gutsy work of a long-distance runner who possesses the wit and endurance, the staying power of authentic genius. This first collection is controlled beauty and strength, and the exhilaration of images and music encountered are necessary and believable. There's great celebration here. --Yusef Komunyakaa, Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet and Global Distinguished Professor of English at NYU A truly auspicious debut by a brilliant young writer of wide-open ear and versatile tongue. Campbell's imagery slices through fog; these poems are nourished by New World etymologies and old-school ways and wisdoms. His use of poetic form is drum-tight and yet these poems unfold like the infinity of a coast-line, sinuous and generous. In the black diaspora Campbell writes from and about, "all angels have afros" and all poems are song. Running the Dusk is deep-souled, keen-eyed, knowing, honed, gorgeous. This is a heralding book we'll be talking about for a long time to come. --Elizabeth Alexander, Obama's Inaugural Poet and Chair of African American Studies at Yale University

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Book SynopsisThis collection of Chris Abani's longer poems, some previously published, the majority new, displays his astonishing energy, beauty of expression and range of reference to contemporary life, history, art and literature. Having this work together in one volume enables us to see the dialogue between a sense of the personal and an engagement with the public and historical, from 'Daphne's Lot' which explores the life of an Englishwoman (his mother) caught up in the madness of the Biafran civil war, or 'Buffalo Women', an epistolary sequence of poems between lovers caught up in the American civil war. The focus of Abani's poems is frequently on extreme situations where the unspeakable becomes too readily the doable, but where against the odds compassion and love remain and the individual determination to resist public madness. In 'Sanctificum' there is a profound meditation on the sacred, whether reached through religious ritual or through art, and the narrow dividing line between the urge to reach for mastery and transcendence and the abuses of power whether personal, contemporary or historical."In this eclectic and imaginative poetry book Chris Abani takes us on a time-travelling journey around the world. He explores history, war, myth, religion, relationships and a poet's personal and philosophical musings. His versatile voice is, variously, audacious, energetic, visual, oblique and always, always, thought-provoking."Bernardine EvaristoChris Abani is the author of 11 books, the recipient of numerous awards for his writing, and is currently holds the position of Professor at the University of California, Riverside.

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Book Synopsis"One need not be fluent in the language of cricket to enjoy the swift, percussive rhythms of Roger Bonair-Agard's second opus calypso. He has refined his line, composed a pulse upon which he conjures, with a sort of astonishing and tender obligation, the fantasies and pathos of adolescence as well as the complexities of mature reflection. These are love poems for Trinidad and America, love poems for their histories, which are tragic, hilarious, wistful and unfinished."Patrick Rosal "Roger Bonair-Agard is a poet of blue lightning and white hot passions--even if the the subject (or metaphor) is the game of cricket. Gully means a lot of things, but in Bonair-Agard's masterful, musical hands, the word means a lot more!"Thomas Lux"In Gully, Roger Bonair-Agard presents the phenomena of muscle memory with such wit and lyricism that the body comes alive. The reader finds his or her own limbs twitching in response to the poems' infectious groove. [...] and the aftershocks of history are revealed under that lens in all their vivid contradiction and verve. While the sidelines of history are theorizing 'postcolonial,' 'post-racial,' 'postmodern,' Bonair-Agard is in the game, 'all feint and dip sharp/ left jab-step and full sprint right/ split knuckle and the rust of blood in the cheek.' This collection is the pin that weaves together our disparate world. Why shouldn't it prick the thumb to show us what we're made of?"Gregory PardloRoger Bonair-Agard is a native of Trinidad & Tobago. He is the author of Tarnish and Masquerade and co-author of Burning Down the House. He teaches at Fordham University. He splits his time between Chicago and Brooklyn.

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Book SynopsisIn 1989, Velma Pollard's Considering Woman, a collection of short stories, fables and memoir, announced an important publishing debut. Now, over twenty years later, a second collection, Considering Woman II, various and rich in its own right, is brought into dialogue with the republishing of the earlier pieces in a single volume. Dialogue between its components is, indeed, intrinsic to the organisation of Considering Woman II. Whilst the stories in 'Bitter Tales' are very explicitly set in the past, they are often accompanied by a present-day women's talk commenting on the story. In 'Mrs Uptown' for instance, we learn that what begins as a story of male abandonment, but becomes an account of a woman who finds a good man and happiness, is being told by the now elderly woman to her neighbour at a conference called 'Young Women in Crisis'. It is clear that the world presented in these pungently written stories of rape, abuse and unsupported pregnancies is not safely in the past. And the balancing sequence of 'Better Tales', each of which arrives at some place of epiphany, safety and even contentment, does so in a world where babies are abandoned in pit latrines, where poverty forces families to give away their children, and a young woman has five unsupported children by the age of twenty-five. If the later stories no longer feel the need to reflect on the process and reception of women's writing (which the earlier collection does very wittily), across all the work is an acutely sensitive consciousness of the consequences of the passage of time. 'Gran…', the longest piece in the book, is both a deeply moving account of the consequences of growing old, and a record of a vanishing way 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 Synopsis"Without losing the joy of play or the play of the rhythms, Dub Wise celebrates the burdens and delights of love, friendships and the responsibility of being at home in the world. Geoffrey Philp's new book is witty, playful, gracious and, yes, wise. An enjoyable read from beginning to end." Olive SeniorGeoffrey Philp was born in Jamaica. He now lives and works in Miami. He maintains a blog @ geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com

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Book SynopsisShowcasing one of the Caribbean's most original and innovative poets, this anthology exemplifies sharp observation, disarming honesty about the human heart's complexities, and a most sophisticated sense of landscape and space. These are poems about Jamaica, venturing far beyond references that create local color to express an often troubled and uncertain love for the island and how its creative power spreads to those beyond its shores. Offering a compelling immersion into what can best be described as Caribbean metaphysical poetics, this collection contains an indigenous secular spirituality that obscures the divide between the spiritual and the sensual.Christine Craig is a former tutor at the University of the West Indies, an adjunct professor at Barry University and the former Miami editor of the Jamaica Gleaner. She is the author of Bird Gang, Emanuel and His Parrot, Emanuel Goes to Market, and Mint Tea and Other Stories. She lives in Fort Lauderdale, FloridaChristine Craig is a well known Jamaican short story writer and poet who also writes children's fiction. She was born in Kingston, Jamaica and spent much of her early years in rural St. Elizabeth, Jamaica.

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Book Synopsis"This is a marvellous collection filled with a lovely and evocative music. Highly recommended."Library ReviewSince the publication of her first collection, The Water Between Us, Shara McCallum has steadily created a rich body of poems, mining the rich deposit of emotional and intellectual capital in her background of multiple migrations. Her work has explored what it means to emerge from childhood in a Rastafarian home filled with reckless idealism and enter a new world of American landscapes and values.The Face of Water collects some of her best poems, poems that establish her as a poet of deft craft, and craftiness. She manages in these poems to enact the grand alchemy of the best poems – the art of transforming the most painful and sometimes mundane details of life into works of terrible and satisfying beauty. Shara McCallum hails from Kingston, Jamaica. She is the author of three collections of poetry: This Strange Land, Song of Thieves, and The Water Between Us, winner of the 1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Her poems have been several times nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and in 2011 she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. She teaches and directs the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.

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Book SynopsisPersonal heartbreak and public trauma are united in this haunting new collection from Seni Seneviratne. Her poems are both personal, enchanting lyrics of desire and political portrayals of life that has been marginalised, brutalised and lost. Each poem here catches a sadness, sometimes with the twist of a knife. Yet the sudden twists of anger and tragedy are cradled in compassion, acceptance and transcendence, and the overall effect is both compelling and soothing. The Heart of It is a tender, moving collection, full of passionate intensity and an unswerving faith in the power of reconciliation and love."These tender, moving poems weave a delicate web." – Jackie KaySeni Seneviratne was born and raised in Leeds, of English and Sri Lankan heritage. Her debut collection, Wild Cinnamon and Winter Skin, was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2007, and includes a poem which was Highly Commended by the judges in the Forward Poetry Prize. Her work was showcased in the groundbreaking Bloodaxe anthology Ten: New Poets from Spread the Word in 2010, championed by Carol Ann Duffy. Her poem 'Operation Cast Lead' was shortlisted in the 2010 Arvon International Poetry Competition. She has given readings, performances and workshops in the UK, the US, Canada, South Africa and Egypt.

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Book SynopsisWith the verbal urgency of Ginsberg's Howl, and a visionary imagination in the company of Blake, Fault Lines confirms Kendel Hippolyte's reputation as one of the Caribbean's most important poets.These poems are dreaded, urgent prophecies of 'a black sky beyond' – indispensable guides to life on a small island constantly threatened by the thrashings of capitalism in crisis. Here St. Lucia's Paradise is a cruise ship come to remind you of your neo-colonial status, where global consumerism has poisoned the ambition of youth towards drugs, crime and violence.And a true poem is a glimpsed oblique track opened by the strenuous silver writhingof a poetriddling a living way through dying language, creating a whole, hoping we fall, mindful,into it (from 'Silverfish')Kendel Hippolyte was born in St. Lucia in 1952, and is a poet, playwright and director. He has published five books of poetry, including Birthright (Peepal Tree, 1997) and Night Visions (2006). He has performed his work in the Caribbean, Europe and America. In 2007, he won the Bridget Jones Travel Award to travel to the UK to present his one-man dramatised poetry production, Kinky Blues, at the annual conference of the Society for Caribbean Studies. In 2000 he was awarded the St. Lucia Medal of Merit (Gold) for his contribution to the arts.

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Book SynopsisThe poems in this collection display a remarkable energy from a writer now in his eighties: effortlessly exploring the grand themes of ambition, rebellion, innocence lost, memory, love and death. The selected poems, some significantly revised, retain their original lustre and now enter into rewarding dialogue with a range of new works - tough in their honesty, witty in their insights, and universal in their appeal.Hailed as a "superb craftsman" by the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, Thompson is at home in many forms: free verse, rhymed quatrains, haiku and villanelles – in patois or standard English. The centrepiece of the new work is a long poem, 'The Colour of Conscience', which explores the dynamics, personal and social, of being a white poet in a black country.Ralph Thompson is a leading Jamaican poet. His most recent collection, View from Mount Diablo (Peepal Tree Press, 2009, 2nd ed.), won the 2001 Jamaican National Literary Competition and was hailed as "a remarkable achievement" by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louis Simpson. His work has been published in many international journals, including The London Magazine, as well as The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry (1992) and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse (2009).

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Book SynopsisSouth Eastern States is a poetry collection centred around travel – ranging from his native Barbados, across the Southern States of the US (especially his home-state of Georgia), and on to Brazil. To share Anthony Kellman's journeyings is to delight in his eye for 'our small deep gestures', the 'polyphony in the common salt' of human interaction.There are telling observations on both the tenacity of the old and the curiosity of the very young. There are savagely witty tales about the pretension and philistinism still rife on the island of his birth, as well as poems of homage to those authors, like George Lamming, who strive to reverse the trend. Most of all, though, there is an overwhelming urge to sing songs of praise.Anthony Kellman was born in Barbados in 1955. At eighteen he moved to London, drawing up close links with the Poetry Society and the likes of Alan Brownjohn, James Berry and Peter Forbes. He is the author of seven collections, including Limestone (2008) and Wings of a Stranger (2001), and two novels, The Houses of Alphonso (2004) and The Coral Rooms (1994), all published by Peepal Tree Press. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Augusta College, Georgia.

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Book SynopsisAnn-Margaret Lim's poetry is alert to all the contradictions of contemporary Jamaica. There are lyric and delicate poems that find fresh things to say about its land and seascapes, and its novelties as discovered by her child. These appear alongside pungent, arresting poems in response to the endemic violence, misogyny and poverty of a divided society.Lim writes in both Caribbean English and Jamaican patois, reflecting on her Chinese and African heritage, and on shaping experiences, good and bad. Hers is a feisty, questioning persona, charged with wit, an imaginative eye for revealing detail, and the warmth of celebration.Ann-Margaret Lim was born in 1976 and lives in Red Hills, Jamaica. She has been published in journals (including the Caribbean Writer and NYU's Calabash), anthologies and her country's two major newspapers, the Gleaner and the Observer. She has a BA in English Literature and has benefitted from workshops conducted by Wayne Brown, Mervyn Morris and Kwame Dawes, as well as the poetry of such greats as Derek Walcott.

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Book SynopsisIn addition to Victor Questel's fine poems first published in Score (with Anson Gonzalez), Near Mourning Ground and Hard Stares, this Caribbean Modern Classic features an extended essay by the eminent Caribbean critic, Gordon Rohlehr, "These Collapsing Times": Remembering Q.Victor D. Questel established himself as one of the finest new Caribbean poets in the 1970s with three collections, all published in his native Trinidad: Score (1972) published jointly with his friend Anson Gonzalez, Near Mourning Ground (1979) and his posthumous Hard Stares (1982). Sadly, Victor Questel died too young at 33 in 1982 – and who knows how his writing would have further developed. What is evident is that his poetry developed rapidly in the ten years between first and last publications, and that he left many fine poems that continue to speak to the present. The poems in this collection move from the orality and bitter punning of Prelude (his section of Score) that deal with the fall-out from the Black Power revolution of 1970; to his sceptical investigations of faith, particularly the family resonances of Spiritual Baptist ritual in Near Mourning Ground, and the severe and stoical poems of Hard Stares that look at himself, domesticity and political corruption. Questel, as Gordon Rohlehr’s exceptional tribute and close reading of the poems shows, was an unsparing observer of his own and his region’s failings. His world is frequently a dark one, but the poems are intense with life and bracingly free from sentimentality or self-pity. His scepticism centred most rigorously on himself as a poet, and drove him to the continuing refinement of the language and forms of his verse.Gordon Rohlehr was Questel’s tutor at the University of the West Indies (St Augustine), mentor and friend. His afterword is a record of the man, the development of the poetry and the times. But it is so much more. For the non-Trinidadian reader, or reader of a later generation, Rohlehr provides a rich account of an era in Trinidad when hope and despair were inseparable. Questel’s poetry speaks for itself, but the afterword has much to say about the why of the poems. It is also a piece of writing that stands in its own right as a moving record of an intellectual relationship in which, though Rohlehr never speaks about himself, he reveals so much about the subtleties and richness of his own mind and his own scrupulous weighing of the balance between hope and despair.

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Book SynopsisIn 2011 the Government of Trinidad & Tobago declared a state of emergency to counter the violent crime associated with the drugs trade. Ground Level confronts the roots of the madness and chaos seething under the surface of this "crude season of curfew from ourselves" when the state becomes a jail. For Rahim, her country is a place "blind to what is going on, hooked on carnival and hedonism/ trivia in the press", where "No-one hears the measure of shadow in any rhythm". It is a place where the air is "made less fresh each year/as forests disappear". It is a place where "poets hurt enough to die". In this dread season, Rahim finds hope and consolation in the word and in those places where it is possible to find salvation in "this landscape of ever-opening doorways", such as Grand Riviere, the subject of a long, twelve-part reflection on the values that can still be found in rural Trinidad. Elsewhere she engages in dialogue with those writers who confronted the Janus face of Caribbean creativity and nihilism: poets such as Eric Roach, Victor Questel, Walcott, Brathwaite and Martin Carter, praying of the last "let his words drop on the conscience of a nation". To the late Jamaican poet Tony McNeill she confides that "The Ungod of things has not changed". This is an ambitious collection that speaks in both a prophetic and a highly literary, intertextual voice, which combines the personal and the public in mutually enriching ways. Rahim knows that it is "craft keeps every story true", that "language playing dead only/ to ambush change." This is Jennifer Rahim's fourth collection of poetry; it shows the assurance of a poet who has constantly worked at her craft, but who also takes formal risks to capture the reality of desperate times.

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Book SynopsisThis is a second, significantly revised, edition of the work of Eric Roach, who with Claude McKay and Louise Bennett was the Caribbean's most important poet before the generation of Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite. It collects the poems published in literary journals between 1938-1973, Roach's early pseudonymous work and a substantial selection of his unpublished poems from manuscript. The collection is edited and introduced by Kenneth Ramchand, Professor Emeritus at the University of the West Indies.When the first edition appeared in 1992, it was recognised as one of the most important Caribbean publishing events of recent years. This second edition adds a number of rediscovered poems and includes significant variants of a number of Roach's most important poems."The most splendid voice of the Caribbean Renaissance (1948-1972)."Kamau BrathwaiteEric Merton Roach was born in 1915 in Tobago. As well as three plays – Belle Fanto (1967), Letter from Leonora (1968) and A Calabash of Blood (1971) – he accumulated an impressive body of poetry. In 1974, leaving behind 'Finis', a suicide note transformed into art, Roach drank insecticide and swam out to sea at Quinam Bay, itself the subject of his fine poem 'At Quinam Bay'. He was posthumously awarded the Trinidad and Tobago National Hummingbird Gold Medal in 1974.

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Book SynopsisThe poems in Irki rise out of Kadija Sesay's experiences – amusing, loving, confusing, sad – of growing up in foster care in the UK after leaving her home country of Sierra Leone.'Irki' means 'homeland' in the Nubian language, a language and history fast becoming extinct, but the poems conjure up images of home as an imagined, remembered, still physical place. Writing as a second-generation West African, Kadija also recounts her arrival to the UK (with parents of different religions), and her experience of growing up Black against the racially divided background of Britain in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.Kadija Sesay was born in Sierra Leone. She read West African studies at Birmingham University, then became a freelance journalist. In the mid-1990s she set up the newspaper Calabash. She founded SABLE LitMag in 2001 and the SABLE LitFest in 2005. Kadija has edited several important anthologies, including IC3: the Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (2000), co-edited with Courttia Newland; Write Black, Write British (2005); and Red: An Anthology of Contemporary Black British Poetry (Peepal Tree, 2010), co-edited with Kwame Dawes. Her own poems have appeared in anthologies published by Canongate, Apples & Snakes, Macmillan and Flipped Eye. She lives in London.

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Book SynopsisVelma Pollard is a writer, a researcher, and an educator from Jamaica. She is the author of several books, including" The Best Philosophers I Know Can't Read and Write," "Considering Woman I & II," "Crown Point and Other Poems," and "Shame Trees Don't Grow Here." She is also the recipient of the prestigious Casa de las Americas Prize for her novella "Karl."

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Book SynopsisEdward Baugh has one of the most recognisable voices in Caribbean poetry: his dry wit, poise and elegance, his constant capacity to surprise with the range of his concerns. Black Sand comprises poems selected from Baugh's two previous collections, A Tale from the Rain Forest (1988) and It was the Singing (2000), plus a collection's worth of new poems. His subject matter ranges wide: race, history, sport, love, the academic life, the consolations of natural beauty. He also casts a shrewd eye over a Jamaica characterised by urbane polish, gated communities, religious enthusiasm, and a black majority still struggling against the wrongs of the past."Edward Baugh has been able... to avoid imitation and stay tellingly brief in the midst of such epic scale... He does not disappoint."The Poetry ArchiveEdward Baugh was born in Jamaica in 1936. Growing up in Port Antonio, he witnessed the unusual sight of his small hometown being taken over by the Hollywood actor Errol Flynn, whose private yacht was anchored in the bay. A Commonwealth Scholarship later took him to Manchester University, where he gained his PhD. He edited Derek Walcott's Selected Poems (2007); a monograph, Derek Walcott, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007, and reissued in 2012. Edward taught at the University of the West Indies for over thirty years, and has held various visiting posts in the UK and the US.

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Book SynopsisRaymond Ramcharitar is a writer, a journalist, and a cultural critic from Trinidad. He is the author of a controversial study of the Trinidadian media, "Breaking the News: Media and Culture in Trinidad," the short story collection "The Island Quintet," and the poetry collection "American Fall."

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Book SynopsisVahni Capildeo is the author of the poetry collections "Dark & Unaccustomed Words," "No Traveller Returns," "Person Animal Figure," and "Undraining"" Sea," and her work has appeared in the anthologies "Identity Parade," "In the Telling," and "The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse." She is a contributing editor and the UK agent and representative for the "Caribbean Review of Books" and a member of the International Advisory Board for the "Journal of Indo-Caribbean Studies."

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Book SynopsisDifficult Fruit grapples with personal experience - with naming and claiming the 'fruits' of a specific journey into womanhood. This journey is one which includes coming to terms with violence and loss, celebrating love and connection, and standing witness in the world that shaped that journey. It is a collection of poems about coming into self-knowledge - of fighting for and winning personhood as a woman in the world. The central poem, 'Eighteen', chronicles the aftermath of sexual assault. In it the speaker is reborn from the shadow of the experience as a 'miracle scream' and a 'dark voice', and vows to 'learn the language that will allow [her] to summon [her] own angels'. By the poem 'Thirty', the speaker understands 'maybe older and wiser is just learning/ how to put yourself in your own good hands'. The poems of age scattered throughout the manuscript both chronicle and disrupt time - they look back into the speaker's past as a way to understand the present, as well as to find something that the speaker needs in order to move forward. The many elegies in the collection consider the ultimate price of life, which is death, and as the poem 'How It Touches Us' comes to realise, 'all laws of matter must hold true'. The poems are a movement through fracture - both necessary and unwarranted - toward wholeness and transformation.Trade ReviewTo go back "is a verb conjugated in dreams," Lauren K. Alleyne writes in her debut volume Difficult Fruit, inscribing the governing mystery of this work, the secret knowledge of the dead. In anaphoric bursts of incantatory disclosure, in ghazals of love and survival, eros and the infinite, she does, indeed, go back, past all griefs and illuminations, "to the song beneath the song." There is uncommon spiritual knowledge here as well as political discernment. There is much to learn while accompanying Alleyne on her "raft of language," through a troubled world and an imagined heaven, to the place "from which comes all singing." I have gone with her and would do so again and again. - Carolyn Forche These "lyrics lay bare the marrow," examine an interior life and dreams, then turn their faces outward to the world with messages of celebration, cultural displacement, the transport of temporal sensation and the torment and regret of violence and self-destruction." - Alison Meyers, Executive Director of Cave Canem Lauren Alleyne's voice is a revelatory and formidable fusion of irrepressible music and uncompromising craft. Like snippets of cinema, these poems arrest the senses and challenge what's known. Every door this exceptional work opens onto a larger light. - Patricia Smith Difficult Fruit is a book I wish there were no need for. But need there is; and Alleyne delivers poems of loss and grief and, thankfully, hope. "Meaning is the closest we get to salvation,/which is to say the word changes nothing/--it does not unmake the rivers," she writes. But addressing the ages in ghazal and crown and free verse forms, she reminds us, in the "flaming sentence" that in one's life, "it is in the raft of language we begin our escape." - Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon In a masterful and sure poetic voice, a stunning debut, Lauren Alleyne takes us through the milestones of a life - from the vulnerabilities of a woman facing the pressures of forming her own identity, to what it means to be a person of difference, to what it means to journey through a culture with racial profiling. At the same time, Alleyne shows us what it means to love, to become engaged in a life of passion directed not only toward a single person but toward the world at large. - Mary Swander, Poet Laureate of Iowa, author of The Girls on the Roof "Readers will enjoy this body of work because of its unconventional approach and Alleyne's personal touch is just enough for readers to understand that she's writing from the heart. Take the plunge and enjoy a piece of Difficult Fruit." - Leslie Haidez De Jesus, qbr.com This collection of poems, small in size, carries great power and beauty and insightfulness within its covers ... The words carry much weight within their arrangements and much beauty in their cadence. Lauren K. Alleyne has stripped away the pretenses so often found in such collections and given readers the assignment to examine their own lives and find the essences of their souls. Rosi Hollinbeck, San Francisco Book Review

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Book Synopsis"Jane King" is very much present in these poems, though never in obvious autobiographical ways. She is the observant eye taking in the beauties and droughts, climatic and human, she sees in St Lucia and in the semi-public lives of her neighbours. Hers is also the inward eye that plumbs dream states, the unconscious and the alarming darkness that the free-floating imagination sometimes reaches. If the poems selected from her previous collections, In to the Centre and Fellow Traveller have a greater focus on the absurdities of race, the traps of history and the dread context of Caribbean postcolonial politics in the 1980s and early 90s, and witty acidic poems on gender and male betrayal, Performance Anxiety takes further those signs in the earlier collections that Jane King is a distinctively original explorer of the inner person, and of the world on the margins of perception. In the new poems, organised around the metaphors of spectacle, performance and vulnerability, there is a reaching for a vision that offers some map to being "lost in this strange century". This is sought in the dialectics of birth and death and in remembering the vision of the child "innocent as clay" in the midst of adult despairs. Not least is vision sought in the making of the poem itself, the "frail boat" that if built wrong, surrenders to the sea, but whose risky venturing may lead to clarity. As the tree teaches in the poem "The Performer Gains Some Comfort from a Tree", it is "what's softest, most vulnerable [that] conquers drought".Jane King Hippolyte was born in St Lucia. She was educated in Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, St Lucia and Scotland. She was awarded an MA in Literary Studies at Deakin University, Australia.She has worked as a secondary teacher in Scotland and St Lucia, then as a senior lecturer in English at the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College in St Lucia where she is currently Dean of the Division of Arts, Science and General Studies. She has also been an assistant chief examiner for CAPE Literatures in English, and has served as a judge and chairperson for the Commonwealth Writers Prize.She was awarded Witter Bynner and James Michener fellowships at Yaddo, New York, and the University of Miami respectively. She was awarded the Minvielle & Chastanet Fine Arts Award for Poetry in 1990 and the James Rodway Memorial Prize, awarded by Derek Walcott for Fellow Traveller in 1994.She has a number of acting and directing credits in theatre and was a founding director of the Lighthouse Theatre Company, St Lucia. She has been active in community service.Her previous publications are In to the Centre (1993) and Fellow Traveller (1994) and her work has appeared in numerous journals and is widely anthologised.

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Book SynopsisAnother Crossing tells the stories of an individual life, of a family, of the communities of Chapeltown and Harehills, and of crucial moments in the making of Leeds as a place where cultures meet. In poetry that sings from the page, Another Crossing recreates places that have been swept away by time, like the house on 56 Cowper Street where Kadijah Ibrahiim's Jamaican grandmother captured her from time to time, where there was black pride and Victorian respectability, where there were aunts who gave the young girl a cultural education, where her grandfather entertained his friends in the sanctum of the West Indian front room - and where there was a forbidden attic whose religious significance only became clear long afterwards. Or there was her mother's house on Gathorne Mount, a place that moved to the looser beat of reggae, where there was strict discipline, love, good food - and blues parties in the cellar. The poems tell of the days when youths were excluded from school for growing their locks, of the bonfire night riots, police harassment and overt racism. But they were also the days when black people in Leeds were creating their own culture in music, dance, dress - shaped by influences from the Caribbean, from Black American music, and from British punk, into something unique. In rhythms that draw from the music being celebrated, with an unerring eye for the details of style that catch a moment, Another Crossing both recreates the recent past, and uses that recreation to ask questions about the present. Where has that political fire gone? Where the energies that danced to a political beat? But if there are notes of regret for a lost clarity of vision, there is also celebration of times that continue to inspire.Trade Review"Here is a marvellous collection of poems that speaks to Leeds and the world; there's lyricism here, and history and joy, politics, food, anger, and love. Above all there's a powerful voice steeped in the Black Yorkshire experience that truly mines the universal in the local." Ian McMillan "Khadijah combines her rich gifts for rhythm, rhyme and rap in these wonderfully evocative poems which carry a rare authenticity, drawing as they do from lived experience. These are poems about family, friendships, love and survival - and ultimately a people's growing awareness of their rights and worth in a society that barely welcomed them." Jacob Ross, author of Pynter Bender

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Book SynopsisWhat is at the heart of Cyril Dabydeen's poetry is an acute sense of geography as both space and time. It is a sense that begins in personal biography, of the writer born in Guyana, long settled in Canada and conscious of his ancestral connections to India. Place frequently provides the subject matter and the metaphorical threads that run through the collection. Poems are drawn to hinterlands and interiors both as actual places and as mental landscapes and as a metaphor for the interior life of the poem - frequently independent of the writer's conscious intentions. Poems investigate journeyings and borders that connect to the adventure of engaging with the otherness of encountered people. Poems celebrate identities that can never be other than as multi-layered as the places that shaped them. Cyril Dabydeen writes with lyric grace, but perhaps his most characteristic voice is conversational, often witty and amused in its sharing of experiences as diverse as the incidents of travel, cricket, and the absurd pretensions of the literary world. In these conversations with the reader, the poems make enlightening connections between ancient Greece and Amerindian myth in Guyana; the present and the buried voices of the past. In paying homage to the great Guyanese writer Wilson Harris, Cyril Dabydeen signals that he too is a rejector of absolutes, in search of multiple possibilities.

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Book SynopsisStrange Fruit is the latest poetry collection by experimental Caribbean poet and theorist Kamau Brathwaite.

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Book Synopsis"In Kingston Buttercup, her marvelous second book, Ann-Margaret Lim’s fresh, honest, and tenderly-fierce perspective comes through in highly readable lyric poems. Her poems explore a range of locales, from the sea bottom, the underside of bridges, the riverbeds, the Taíno hills, the cane fields, the Kingston cityscape and the Jamaican countryside. She draws from complex subject matter: plantation diaries, slave narratives, slave sale notices and the poet’s own family’s multi-generational, entwined stories from China, West Africa, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. In poems that remain rooted in contemporary Jamaica, Lim writes about life as a woman, daughter and mother with empathy, great love and the sometimes urgent, cleansing fyah." — Loretta Collins Klobah, author of The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman“Ann-Margaret Lim’s lyrical gold transmuted from pain, passion, and a deeply felt historical consciousness mirrors the hardy Kingston buttercup that hides sharp thorns beneath a seductive golden flower. Her brave and triumphant exploration of home, family, personal and racial identity through twenty-first century livity will resonate long after closing.” — Olive Senior, Author of Shell and Over the Roofs of the World. “Kingston Buttercup is an intriguing collection of close portraiture, painting precise cross-sections of Jamaican lives, past and present. Lim's poetry unreels steadily without excess, focusing her careful gaze on what has been lost, by reweaving her own personal history in a smoky bar in Beijing, chasing the memory of her mother on the streets of Venezuela, or embodying the lost slave narratives of Jamaican slave plantations. She gives voice to the ghosts of our violent past, gives song to our overlooked and downtrodden, even finding a way to elegise the violent chaos of her hometown of Kingston, by populating these pages with hot sun and sweat, with brash taximen and grieving women, lending a listening ear to the reggae and patois that fill her poems with music. Lim is most moving when she is examining the complex joy and hardship of Jamaican womanhood and motherhood through snapshots of her life, showing us how family is the lyric she always carries with her, how grace can still be found in the utter beauty of the natural world.” — Safiya Sinclair, Author of Cannibal.

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Guyana Prize, The Language of Eldorado has been long recognised as an outstanding work of Caribbean poetry. Its beauty lies in its ability to convey complex ideas through concrete images that work on the reader both sensually and intellectually. Its focus is the relationship between language, landscape and the history of human settlement in Guyana. The collection is dedicated to Wilson Harris whose challenging and paradigm-changing ideas on these matters deeply influenced Mark McWatt’s own thinking.

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Book SynopsisFrom the vantage point of later middle life, Ian McDonald's collection looks into the heart of time passing: the coming death of aging parents, the old men, the sight of 'my own lines of age' and the loss of pleasure in the glittering carnival of the senses. There are joys in the rich blessings of the arrival of a new child coming unexpected at this stage of life, but those joys are made more piquant by the inescapable sense of the ephemeral. Poems of moving domestic intimacy and humor ('To alarm their fathers half to death/New-born babies hold their breath'), valedictory requiems for the characters who have given Georgetown life its flavor and regret for the country's loss of civility during its darkest recent years and songs in praise of nature are all part of a vision which looks into the darkness but says, 'Yes, it is as you say, / But let us get just one thing straight: / There is beauty in the world/ ... And the star-tree blossoms in the night, /Night that will have an end.'

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Book SynopsisPoetry Book Society Recommendation. Ricantations will reinforce the perception of Loretta Collins Klobah as superb poetic story-teller with a compassionate and radical womanist vision, alert to the multi-layered reality of Puerto Rican life, where shiny modernity gives way to spirit presences. There are absorbingly reflective poems on Velasquez’ paintings of an hyperphagic child, painted both naked and clothed, a stray horse that hangs around the poet’s property, homunculi in glass bottles in a teaching hospital, the keeper of a butterfly farm, a high-wire circus family, and the irony of Nathan Leopold (with Loeb, the perpetrator of a famously brutal crime in the USA) becoming the expert on Puerto Rican bird life.Poems begin from the most fantastic premises – a Che Guevera club in heaven with prizes for the coolest Che impersonator – then line by rich baroque line open up her island’s secret heart, revealing a society under multiple pressures even before Hurricane Maria, about which the title poem offers a brilliantly hallucinatory picture. Love must always be mixed with despair in a society where the reckless machismo of New Year gunfire kills a young woman, and older men prey on schoolgirls.New World English and Spanish rub shoulders in these poems, but the reader soon picks up the precise, word-loving, observant rhythms of the poet’s own voice, a voice which has space for humour, as in a witty sequence of Jamaican poems about the attraction to men of women of ample size.There are more personal and intimate poems – memories of her mother’s psychiatric hospitalisation, of her own struggles with size and health, and the vulnerability of the body when a hurricane can strip life back to its hazardous basics.

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Book SynopsisThe poems in The Coup Clock Clicks were written between 1971 and 1988, reflecting the work of the then young political activist, poems challenging indifference, and mainly concerned to understand and, if possible, ameliorate the situation of others. It is also a personal memoir, shaped as autobiography. In reggae-conscious free verse in Jamaican patwa, these poems are fierce, sometimes witty jeremiads against economic and socio-cultural division, poverty, violence, and thwarted lives. The collection is suffused with references to music – mainly Jamaican popular music, heard everywhere, but displaying Meeks’ sharply observant eye, as in his poem about a Marley concert where the detailed fashion notes vividly point to the actual separation of classes in Jamaica.The later poems reflect on the collapse of 1970s' hopes of decolonisation after the widespread defeat of the left through self-inflicted injuries and the new world order of resurgent American power under Ronald Reagan.As Mervyn Morris notes in his introduction, The Coup Clock Clicks is an important contribution to Caribbean poetry. He characterises Meeks as “a resourceful poet” producing “nicely crafted poems… There is plenty of grief in this collection. But resilience also, and philosophical questioning.”

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Book SynopsisThe third in a quartet of poem-dialogues between Kwame Dawes and John Kinsella, begun in 2015 with the critically acclaimed 'Speak From Here to There' (2016), and followed by 'A New Beginning' (2018), Tangling With The Epic explores commonalities and difference, the results reminding us of how poetry can offer comfort and solace, and how it can ignite a peculiar creative frenzy that enriches.

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Book SynopsisA complex, rich and rewarding new poetry collection from Raymond Ramcharitar.50 is an age to see where you stand with the world and where the world stands with you. Though the collection does not begin “Midway through this life...”, the first two poems are about a Modern Angel and a Modern Virgil. Ramcharitar offers ferociously satiric views of the Modern Caribbean, Modern Journalism and a world inhabited by Trump and Jong Un; in a world that’s out of joint, it’s not surprising to find the Modern Mind trying to mend itself after it’s been shattered. Behind the mordant, funny, and often sad voices speaking in the poems, there’s a romantic spirit at work, a touching faith in the powers of poetry. There’s an investment in formal poetic structures and rigorous rhyming which is not just an acknowledgement of one patron saint, Derek Walcott, but a means to discipline strong feelings.Other patron saints, angels and demons roam the collection’s pages – like the angel formerly known as Sinead O’Connor, the fragile, rebellious figure who calls forth a poem of solidarity and tenderness. From the Mahabarata and The Tempest, Kafka and Joyce to synth-pop heroes like OMD, and elegies for VS Naipaul and Derek Walcott, 50 is the time to confess some strange and unexpected cultural tastes, and acknowledge your realisation of a Prufrockian insignificance in the grand scheme of things. And 50 is also the painful time of saying farewell to parents and questioning what you have given your children, about both of which Ramcharitar writes with touching grace.

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Book SynopsisProverbial wisdom might seem to be about the obvious, but not when your guides are the Orisha of the Yoruba pantheon. It’s not just that the Orisha don’t always agree – and the answer is often another question – but that gods like Esu face both ways and value ambivalence as a truth beyond any simple certainty, know that the world is built on contraries. There are false mentors, too, only too ready to deceive you; “Science” becomes a byword for the naively empirical, where the truth is always more complex, where things never just are or were, but becoming. It’s a world as ancient as the gods and as contemporary as Google maps, where there are always darker forces at work that have to be surmounted. It’s a world of contemporary hazard from, for instance, Islamist terror that makes relevant the ancient wisdom of not sparing baby pythons.Long based in Trinidad and Tobago, Funso Aiyejina might seem to be mostly writing about Nigeria – except that the sharp observations in these poems frequently acknowledge the visible and invisible links between Africa and the Caribbean. This dual resonance comments richly and ambiguously on the question of where home may be.It’s a collection in dialogue with literary ancestors such as Fagunwa, Tutuola, Okigbo, Soyinka and Achebe that takes the form of a journey through the day and the passages of a life, with the consciousness of legs losing “some of their youthful bounce”. There’s a serious and cryptically reflective mind behind these poems, but one that concludes that a mixture of laughter and ceremonious respect is the way to respond to life, that its goal is to write stories as “luminous white canes/ with which our children may tap-tap their ways out of any future darkness.”

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Book SynopsisThe fourth and final instalment in the poetic conversation, begun in 2014, between poets and friends Kwame Dawes and John Kinsella.

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Book SynopsisThe sacred and the profane, self and world, literature and politics meet in the figure of Pierrot. He is the sad clown, holy fool of literary tradition, the suffering artist who connects to Christ in his most human incarnation as Man of Sorrows. He is also the Pierrot Grenade of Caribbean carnival, the most literary of carnival figures who can spell anything, who carries a whip, but lashes with his tongue. Pierrot is both the bedraggled figure at the sordid end of carnival who is weary of the “Infernal cycles of mamaguy kaiso politricks”, and the risen Christ who, if you listen, can be heard to “crack His midnight robber word”. In his ninth collection of poems, John Robert Lee contemplates his 70th year in St Lucia and the sad chimes of mortality as friends and literary and cultural heroes leave this life. It’s a time for a weighing up of where domestic, political, literary and spiritual journeys have reached. It is a time of honest admissions but also renewed faith in all these journeys. This is no retired poetry steeped in reflective sorrow, but probably the most vigorous, demotic, experimental and intimate of John Robert Lee’s collections. More of the man in all his guises appears here, a confessional voice lightened by self-irony and humour. Sometimes Pierrot is an archetypal figure, sometimes he may be thought to be Lee himself. And if salvation is the ultimate prize, few have beaten down the Babylon of the great northern neighbour with a heavier, more righteous lash than Lee wields in his poem, “Who made me a stranger in this world”.

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Book SynopsisMonica Minott’s poems grasp the reader’s attention with a voice that is distinctively personal, both taut and musical – and tender and muscular when the occasion demands. Her language moves seamlessly and always appropriately between standard and Jamaican patwa, a reflection of a vision that encompasses a Black modernity still very much in touch with its aphoristic folk roots, where the ancestral meets Skype or a Jonkonnu band is stuck in a Kingston traffic jam. It is possible to see Minott’s poems as being in a constant dialogue between four quadrants of engagement: with history, with landscape, with personal and family experience and with the worlds of literature, music and art. Minott’s sense of history is deeply informed by a knowledge of the brutalities of commercial empire and of slavery and Black people’s struggles against injustice and for selfhood. There is scarcely a poem that does not have some precisely described sense of the materiality of its circumstance and the interactions between the physical world and human feelings. You sense that what sustains a certain bravery of self-exposure and of risk is a sense of belonging to family histories that have taught endurance, of knowing that loss can be gain (and this is certainly a world into which tragedy intrudes) and the experience of “running from extremity to extremity, to glory”. In literature and the arts, books are “bright lamps to light away dark hours”, and the examples of musicians like Don Drummond and Rico Rodriquez, artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and dancer Barry Moncrieffe point to the possibilities of the transcendent arising out of the everyday. Literature is a way of seeing that connects “Telemachus,/ original rasta and broomseller” of the Kingston streets to the Ulyssean world of voyaging and of seeking a home.

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Book SynopsisIn following up his translation of Contracanto a Walt Whitman / Countersong to Walt Whitman, the publication of Jonathan Cohen’s translation of Poemas de buen amor... y a veces de fantasia, by the great national poet of the Dominican Republic, and an unquestionably major Caribbean poet, Pedro Mir, shows another side entirely of Mir’s work: intensely political in the Countersong, sensual and erotic in Poems of Good Love. There is a challenge that the translator rises to in making English language poems that are truthful to the deliberately opaquer language of this collection in comparison to the communicative clarity of Mir’s more overtly political collections. Here, Mir sets himself the task of writing about love in a way that is truthful to the Marxist historical materialism he embraced, in contrast to what he saw as the conventions of love poetry where love is seen as some kind of disembodied spiritual experience. As the introduction by Silvio Torres-Saillant makes clear, there were negatives as well as positives that followed from the task Mir set himself. It is obvious that fifty years ago (1969), feminism had not yet penetrated Mir’s Latin American Marxism and there are elements of the patriarchal, indeed of the religiously Catholic in Mir’s insistence that the chief purpose of love is procreation. What Mir triumphantly gives us, though, is a celebration of the carnality of love and the sheer joy of sex as the biological gift that (perhaps) ensures our continuance as a human species.With an introduction by Silvio Torres-Saillant

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