Search results for ""peepal tree press ltd""

Shivanee Ramlochan’s poems take the reader through a series of imaginative narratives that are at once emotionally familiar and compelling, even as the characters evoked and the happenings they describe are heavily symbolic. Her poems reference the language and structural patterns of the genres of fantasy or speculative fiction, though with her own distinctive features, including the presence of such folkloric Trinidadian figures as the Duenne, those wandering lost spirits whose feet point backwards. In these poems, a woman is invariably the protagonist and Ramlochan is eloquent in her exploration of the ways in which gender has to be negotiated. They constantly challenge the stereotypes of the female. The female force that Ramlochan explores in her poems is creative and destructive, vulnerable and untameable. In poem after poem, the female assumes the elemental roles of both saviour and devil.

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It is the late 1980s in southern Sri Lanka. Bradley Sirisena's father is tortured and abducted in the violent struggle for power between the state and local insurgents. Some fifteen years later, his disappearance remains unresolved.Savi, a Sri Lankan research student long settled in the UK, has lost her way in both her thesis and her life, when she receives a wedding invitation from the uncle she would rather ignore. Meanwhile in a coastal fort in Sri Lanka, her cousin Renu continues to try to uncover the secret of Bradley's father's disappearance. Reunited on Savi's return to Sri Lanka, the cousins are compelled to confront truths that put them into direct conflict in their understanding of both the past and themselves. As Bradley's story draws to its inevitable end, the tsunami strikes and carries them all into a future that promises to be even more disturbing than the past.The novel is a haunting evocation of intersecting lives and parallel times that draws upon real historical events. In this richly textured book, myth and magic merge, as the bustle of a seaside city in England gives way to the unreal calm of coastal communities in southern Sri Lanka where thousands disappeared without trace.This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.

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When a young white child growing up in Tanzania discovers why her family’s African gardener so dislikes the chameleon she spots in a tree, she is plunged into a puzzled awareness of the complexities of race, colour and difference.As the ‘I’ of the stories grows into adulthood in Nigeria, she too becomes a chameleon of sorts, one thing when she is with her Nigerian friends, another with the white tribe when she can no longer resist the lure of the scarce luxuries to be had at the British embassy. When the ‘I’ makes the crossing from Nigeria to the Caribbean, she discovers that it is not only people who are chameleons. Osun, the Yoruba orisha has also made the journey, a little outwardly changed, but inwardly the same in Trinidadian and Cuban manifestations.In the earlier stories, the ‘I’ has a childhood innocence that, in the comment of the distinguished poet UA Fanthorpe, ‘sees all the better for not understanding’. With increasing awareness comes a sense of being an outsider in almost all situations, though in playing mas’ in the Trinidad carnival, there is a glimpse of the transcendence of belonging to the collective. Whether as the child trying to understand her parents, their Muslim servant’s sense of the sacred, or the ‘incomprehensible prohibitions’ of a colonial childhood, there is a constant tension between the sense of separateness and the desire for belonging. And though each of the stories is a first person narrative, what stands out in Bryce’s careful, elegant writing is a very concrete sense of the reality and autonomy of other voices, other views.

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'We began by speaking in our own voices and tongues / then other voices / might take possession of our throats, our / Souls, for however brief or prolonged a moment'. These lines describing the inner world of Stanley Greaves' painting 'Morning Mangoes' also describe the intensity and inwardness of Laurence Lieberman's meeting with the paintings of Greaves and two others of the Caribbean's visionary masters, Ras Akyem and Ras Ishi. In their language and reference, these poems are utterly contemporary, but gain resonance from being part of a poetic tradition of 'pictorialism' that perhaps reached its height in the 19th century with Browning and Ruskin's poetic prose.It is no accident that Lieberman focuses on the work of these three painters, for he clearly finds in them qualities that express his own psyche. In each there is a subversive, speculative, heterogeneous view of the world that challenges 'the lull of the everyday', the homogenising imperialism of western rationalism, consumerism and the market. Each of the painters has his own rich cosmology in which Lieberman finds part of himself.To label these poems as 'descriptions' of the thirty or so paintings focused on in this collection gives no hint of their multiple rewards. They begin, indeed, in the kind of description found only in the very best art criticism: infectiously enthusiastic, exact, clear in the distinction between observation and speculation. They create rewarding and very human connections between the paintings and their makers. We meet them as vivid characters - Greaves with his oblique charm, Akyem's combative, restless energy, Ishi's elusive, enigmatic intensity - and Lieberman finds acutely appropriate and different dramatic styles to represent each painter and their work. But these poems are not merely commentaries on paintings but meditations that begin in the encounter with the art work and grow from that point. Above all, these are poems that work as poems in finding the language and architecture to capture the moment of engagement with the paintings in all its mixture of exactness and provisionality.The collection is illustrated with sixteen colour plates of paintings described in the book."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 GuentherLaurence Lieberman is an American poet with deep Caribbean affiliations. He has published twelve collections of poetry and three volumes of literary essays.

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This pan-African anthology of poetry in translation is unrivalled in its historical, geographic and aesthetic scope. The material ranges from the time of the ancient Nubian King Piankhy to the contemporary Cuban poet Nancy Morejón. Much of the unique selection appears in English translation for the first time in this work. These are outstanding new translations, both precise and literary, which clearly reveal the beauty of the originals.The Trickster's Tongue contains poetry from continental Africa and from the diasporas of the Caribbean, Brazil and Hispanic America: poetry in a variety of genres, both oral and literary, ancient and modern, from the lyrical to the philosophical, and from sacred incantations to verse by former slaves and poetry of anti-colonial protest. The book is both representative and fresh: it contains the work of well-known writers such as Nicolás Guillén and Léopold Sédar Senghor, as well as important but little translated poets such as the Brazilian João da Cruz e Sousa and the Mozambican José Craveirinha.The author provides a scholarly introduction, which examines changing ideas about writing and identity. Each translated poem or excerpt is discussed in a critical commentary, which explains context, allusion, and poetic technique. The book includes a guide to further reading, biographical notes on translated authors, and a comprehensive bibliography.Poet, critic, translator, and musician, Mark Angelo de Brito was born in London in 1963 into a family originally from Trinidad. He studied music at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Mark de Brito has published two books of original verse: Heron's Canoe (Peepal Tree, 2003) and Bigistong (Darengo, 1996). He co-edits the journal Seshat: cross-cultural perspectives in poetry and philosophy.

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A crime-novel in verse, View from Mount Diablo explores the transformation of Jamaica from a sleepy colonial society to a post-colonial nation where political corruption, drug wars, and avenging authorities have made life hell. The resentments class and racial privilege provoke underscore both the turmoil in society and the relationships at the heart of the narrative, between Adam Cole, a dreamy white boy driven by personal tragedy to crusading journalism, squint-eyed Nellie Simpson, once a servant, then a political enforcer, and stuttering Nathan, gardener and groom turned cocaine baron. Beyond this trio is a dazzling array of real and fictitious characters including Bustamante, coke-trade middleman Tony Blake, the informer Blaka, who finds religion, a corrupt plantation owner, and a murderous police officer. In a time when 'Blood / cheaper than drugs', View from Mount Diablo asserts the power of art to tell the truth, to use form and selection of incident to shape unmanageable circumstance into meaningful narrative, and touch the heart to stir the citizen to action. Rich with religious implication, this is a prophetic work of exasperated love, abandoning the softening light of 'an old romantic view' for a 'harsh, uncompromising glare' and blending lyrical narrative with wrenching tragedy.View from Mount Diablo won the 2001 Jamaican National Literary Award.Ralph Thompson is a Jamaican. He paints as seriously as he writes poetry. His work has been published in a number of journals, including the London Magazine. He was the Senior Executive of one of his country's biggest companies.

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As an eighteen year old, Vincent Roth arrived in British Guiana in 1907 to join his father, who was a Government Medical Officer and Magistrate. By the time he left for Barbados in 1964, Roth had spent thirty years in the interior working as a surveyor and magistrate until blackwater fever nearly killed him. Thereafter he contributed immensely to the development of Guyana as a journalist, naturalist, historian, rebuilder of the national museum and founder of the zoo in the Botanical Gardens.From an early age Vincent Roth kept a detailed, account of his experiences, often illustrated with sketches and later by watercolours, and it was from these hand-written journals that his son-in-law, Michael Bennett, edited this book.This first volume covers his early years as a child abandoned to relatives in France, Scotland and London, his reuniting at the age of twelve with his father and step-mother in Australia, his arrival in British Guiana and the first fifteen years of his work in the interior. Blessed with insatiable curiosity, a capacious and exacting memory, Vincent Roth writes vividly of surveying expeditions up the Demerara River, in the North West District, to Arakaka, Morawhanna and Moruca. There are gripping descriptions of the hazards of river travel, hauling up waterfalls and shooting rapids, and the outsize characters of the river captains such as Captain Blood, and their skill and daring. There are fascinating accounts of the peoples of the interior, the Amerindians, the porkknockers, balata bleeders, gold miners, coffee growers and smugglers. Read Roth and you'll know how to pan for gold and diamonds! Deadly snakes, tiger-cats, sloths, water-dogs, hairy bird-eating spiders, rampaging wild hogs and birds of all descriptions provide Roth with moments of wonder, alarm, food - and (as a enthusiastic taxidermist) specimens to stuff.In this volume Roth grows from callow youth to energetic and opinionated manhood, constantly getting under the skin of petty-minded colonial officials - and developing a deep, though sometimes exasperated, love for Guyana.Between 1907 and 1964, Vincent Roth contributed immensely to the development of Guyana, first as a surveyor in the interior, then as a journalist, historian and naturalist.

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When Alfred Grayson, a retired and recently widowed civil servant, decides to buy a dog, Sheba gives him a passport to the diverse multi-racial community of dog-walkers and bench-sitters who meet in a down-at-heel London park. Here Grayson engages with the cunning Finbar, theatrical Arabella and her absurd tango-dancing sidekick, Harold Heyhoe, Jamaican Maryanne, tortured by her demons, Rastafarian Rootsman, old Uncle Nat from Sierra Leone, tattooed Judy and abandoned Lucy.Grayson, originally from Barbados, has passed for white and kept his origins quiet during his civil service career, but two, in particular, of the relationships he makes in the park cause him to rethink his past.In the park, characters, who would not otherwise meet, make unlikely alliances and feel able to expose various identities, or in Alfred's case begin to reconstruct one. Both park and characters have their times of wintry bleakness, shabbiness and moments of glorious display. For Alfred and Lucy there is even the hope that late flowering lust might bloom into love. Like all the best, the richest and most truthful comedy, The Green Grass Tango is filled with a sense of human fragility and impermanence.And there are the dogs: faithful companions and quizzical witnesses to their owners' most intimate deeds!Beryl Gilroy came to London over fifty years ago from Guyana. She wrote six novels, two autobiographical books and was a pioneering teacher and psychotherapist. Sadly, she died in 2000 at the age of 76.

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A man lies in a newspaper-lined room dreaming an other life. Bob Marley's spirit flew into him at the moment of the singer's death. A woman detaches herself from her perfunctory husband and finds the erotic foreplay she longs for in journeying round the island. A man climbs Blue Mountain Peak to fly and hear the voice of God. Sonia paints her new friend Joan and hopes that this will be the beginning of a sexual adventure. Dawes's characters are driven by their need for intimate contact with people and with God, and their need to construct personal myths powerful enough to live by. In a host of distinctive and persuasive voices they tell stories that reveal their inner lives and give an incisive portrayal of contemporary Jamaican society that is unsparing in confronting its elements of misogyny and nihilistic violence. Indeed several stories question how this disorder can be meaningfully told without either sensationalism or despair. For Dawes, the answer is found in the creative energies that lie just the other side of chaos. In particular, in the dub vershan episodes, which intercut the stories, there are intense and moving celebrations of moments of reggae creation in the studio and in performance. Dawes has established a growing international reputation as a poet and these are stories that combine a poetic imagination with narrative drive, an acute social awareness and a deep inwardness in the treatment of character. In the penultimate story, 'Marley's Ghost', Dawes's imagination soars to towering myth.Kwame Dawes is the author of over thirty five books, and is widely recognized as one of the Caribbean’s leading writers. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and a Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. His next book of poetry from Peepal Tree Press will be 'A New Beginning', a cycle of poems written with John Kinsella. He has been elected as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

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In the continuing rite of return to his native Barbados from longer and longer away, something has happened for Tony Kellman. No longer are these the alienated poems of the long gap, of belonging nowhere. With greater establishment in America has come, on the wings of a stranger, the capacity to embrace this past and to see wholly afresh what was once familiar and unremarked. Parallel to these poems of place, are those that explore new love and its power to heal and renew vision.As well as Barbados, there are poems set in worlds as different as sharecropping Georgia and Yorkshire, England. In all of them one hears Kellman's signal voice which combines his urbane capacity to 'hum forever simple pleasure' and the ecstatic vision of a poet who 'puts on the garment of praise' to 'retell our special story'.Part of the freshness of retelling is rooted in Kellman's explorations of the rhythms of Barbadian popular music, particularly the Tuk band, his confident use of the ancestral to make the new.Anthony Kellman was born in Barbados. He currently teaches at Augusta College, Georgia.

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This dual language selection of Martin Carter's poems, edited by David Dabydeen, translated into Spanish by Salvador Ortiz-Carbonares and with an introduction by Gemma Robinson, will establish very clearly that Carter is a major South American poet, in the company of Valejo, Neruda and Paz."What we have is enough to prove, if proof has been needed... that Martin Carter is, without reservation, one of the finest poets to have emerged in the Caribbean region. And the varied subtlety and strength of his poetry carries him without any doubt into the first rank of world poets. Long after the politics which prompted a number of his poems have been forgotten, and long after the society which he often so scathingly indicted has been changed utterly the poetry will continue to strike a chord among new generations."Ian McDonaldThe late Martin Carter was without doubt one of the Caribbean's major poets, only less well known than Walcott and Brathwaite because he rarely left his native Guyana. He came to notice first for his Poems of Resistance (1954) written out of his experiences of the anti-colonial struggle which included his imprisonment by the British for his political activities. His work has been a major influence on the current generation of Caribbean poets as John Agard, David Dabydeen, Fred D'Aguiar, Kwame Dawes, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Grace Nichols among others have elsewhere testified.Martin Carter was born in Guyana in 1927. He first came to attention with Poems of Resistance in 1954. He is unquestionably one of the three great West Indian poets of his generation. He died in 1997.

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'So you want to be a coolie woman?' This accusation thrown at twelve year old June Lehall by her mother signifies only one of the crises June faces during the two dramatic weeks this fast-paced novel describes. June has to confront her mixed Indian-Chinese background in a situation of heightened racial tensions, the loss of her former friends when she wins a scholarship to the local high school, the upheaval of the industrial struggle on the sugar estate where she lives, and the arrival of British troops as Guyana explodes into political turmoil."Jan Shinebourne captures the language of movement, mime, silences, glances, with a feeling that comes from being deep within the heart of the Guyanese community. In The Last English Plantation her achievement lies in having the voices of the New Dam villagers dominate the politically turbulent period of 1950s Guyana - A wonderful and stimulating voyage into the lives behind the headlines, into the past that continues creating the changing present. The voices of the New Dam villagers never leave you."Merle Collins.Jan Lowe Shinebourne was born at Rose Hall sugar estate, in Canje, Berbice, in what was then British Guiana. The country was under colonial rule, and she lived through the dramatic events that moved the country when it became independent and changed its name to Guyana. Jan describes her first three novels and most of her writing as being deeply influenced by this period and the rapid and dramatic changes she experienced. She currently resides in West Sussex.

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Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom takes the reader on a journey of light, from the flicker of the firefly in rural Jamaica, through the half-moonlight of the limbo of exile in the USA to the point of arrival and reconnection imaged by the eight-pointed star.It is also a journey of the voice, traversing back and forth across the Atlantic and across continents, pushing its way through word censors and voice mufflers and ending in tongues of fire."Some writers leave their creative handprints in dark caves where only later happenstance may, perhaps, discover them. Some writers stamp their entire selves upon the language, upon a culture, upon literature and upon our consciousness in so intimate, singular, well-illumined and indelible a manner that there can be no mistaking their poems and prose for those of another. Such a writer is Marcia Douglas."June Owens, The Caribbean WriterMarcia Douglas was born in England and grew up in Jamaica. Currently she lives and works in Boulder, Colorado.

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The Guyanese poet Martin Carter was without question one of the major poets of the English language of our time. In the Caribbean, Carter has long been regarded as one of the great poets who chronicled the journey from colonialism to independence, alongside such figures as Aime Cesaire, Derek Walcott, Nicholas Guillen and Kamau Brathwaite. While his earlier poems have become classics of socialist literature, translated into many languages, and are among the foundation stones of Caribbean poetry, they have hardly been acknowledged in more general accounts of poetry in English. It was too easy for lazy critics and anthologists to dismiss him as 'merely' a political poet, one who swore, as he put it in one poem, to use his shirt as 'a banner for the revolution.'In fact, looking at Carter's work overall it is hard to think of a contemporary poet writing in English who showed more concern for craft, who measured his utterance with greater care. His later work, while it never lost its political edge, was more oblique and cerebral than the overtly political poems of his youth. It sits comfortably alongside that of fellow South American poets Valejo, Neruda and Paz. They are his contemporaries in every sense; his work is of that originality, stature and elemental force.This book sets out to celebrate Martin Carter's life and work and to establish a context for reading his poetry. It locates the several facets of Carter's work in the historical and cultural circumstances of his time, in Guyana, in the Caribbean. It includes essays by many leading academics and scholars of Caribbean literature and history. It is distinguished particularly by a collection of responses to Carter's work by other creative writers, both his contemporaries and a younger generation for whom Carter's work and commitment has been a powerful influence on their own thinking and practice. As well as demonstrating the profound respect in which he is held as a writer, what emerges most strongly from this group of essays and poems from his fellow writers is the extent to which he was loved and admired as a man who - despite the turmoil Guyana has experienced over the last fifty years - remained true to his fundamental belief in the dignity of humankind.Contributors include John Agard, Edward Baugh, Kamau Brathwaite, Stewart Brown, Jan Carew, David Dabydeen, Fred D'Aguiar, Kwame Dawes, Michael Gilkes, Stanley Greaves, Wilson Harris, Roy Heath, Kendel Hippolyte, Louis James, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Eusi Kwayana, George Lamming, Ian McDonald, Mark McWatt, Mervyn Morris, Grace Nichols, Ken Ramchand, Gordon Rohlehr, Rupert Roopnaraine, Andew Salkey and many others."All Are Involved is a difficult book to review. Its contents are so packed, so vital, the statements so well made that paraphrasing them becomes an act of egregious violence. Here is Martin Carter, that "gifted, paradoxical man" (p.45), that "friendly, dreamful, dangerous man" (p.370), analysed, extolled, lavished with the recognition which eluded him in life because of the politics of his poetry, and the poignant truth and moral force of that politics. This book demonstrates how wrong we were to have neglected Carter's voice, how diminished. All Are Involved is a treasure so empowering, a tribute we pay through Martin Carter to all that is human in us. It is a most enduring legacy."Niyi Osundare, World Literature TodayStewart Brown is the editor of several major anthologies as well as critical studies of Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite and Martin Carter.

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El nino stirs clouds over the Pacific. Flashing TV screens urge a calm that no one believes. The police beat a slouched body, crumpled like a fist of kleenex. The news racks are crowded with stories of pestilence, war and rumours of war. The children, once sepia-faced cherubim, mutate to monsters that eat, eat, eat. You notice a change in your body's conversation with itself, and in the garden the fire ants burrow into the flesh of the fruit.Geoffrey Philps's poems stare into the dark heart of a world where hurricanes, both meteorological and metaphorical, threaten you to the last cell. But the sense of dread also reveals what is most precious in life, for the dark and accidental are put in the larger context of season and human renewal, and Hurricane Center returns always to the possibilities of redemption and joy.In the voices of Jamaican prophets, Cuban exiles, exotic dancers, drunks, race-track punters, canecutters, rastamen, middle-class householders and screw-face ghetto sufferers, Geoffrey Philp writes poetry which is both intimately human and cosmic in scale. On the airwaves between Miami and Kingston, the rhythms of reggae and mambo dance through these poems.Geoffrey Philp was born in Jamaica. He now lives and works in Miami.

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The poems in Moving On recreate moments of change, loss and epiphany. There are vivid glimpses of a pre-war Jamaican childhood - of sexual discovery under a billiard table and of the rude ingratitude of a goat saved from dissection in the school biology lab. The long sequence, 'Goodbye Aristotle, So Long America', explores the years of study at a Jesuit university in America and the making both of a lifetime's values and of the sense of irony which has made it possible to live with them.Other poems reflect on the experience of ageing, of increasing vulnerability, but also of an increased appreciation for what sustains human relationships through time.Jamaica is present in these poems as a place of aching natural beauty, but whose violent human energies can only be viewed with an ambivalent love and fear, where: 'In the city's bursting funeral parlours/ the corpses glow at night, nimbus of blue/ acetylene burning the darkness under the roof,/ lighting the windows - crunch of bone and sinew/ as a foot curls into a cloven hoof.'"It is exquisite poetry throughout. Images of 'the sun turning cynical', 'the ocean, washing colonial guilt/like seaweed from an unrepentant beach', of 'albino hawks' and 'a black Clint Eastwood' mocking; of 'an awning pulled up like the lid/of an eye afraid to blink' and of 'the lip of the sea and the lip of the sky/zip-locked the horizon' are pure art. Moving On is a feast."Sheila Garcia-Bisnott, The Weekly Gleaner.Ralph Thompson is a Jamaican. He paints as seriously as he writes poetry. His work has been published in a number of journals, including The London Magazine. He was the Senior Executive of one of his country's biggest companies.

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When a group of Jamaican students and their lecturers begin an archaeological dig on the old estate of Plantation Plains, each has different expectations.For Professor Milton, recently returned home after years abroad, the dig is to be the crowning achievement of a distinguished career. For Kwame, a lecturer from Ghana, it is the opportunity to use his knowledge to help identify African survivals in the New World. For rastafarian Akete, the dig is going to be part of his mission to bring a sense of their African heritage to his fellow sufferers in the ghetto, and for Carla the excavations on the site of the Big House and the slave quarters are potent reminders that her own ancestry is both black and white. For the two young Americans who join them, the dig is the first chance to put their archaeological skills into practice in an exotic new environment.Each of the diverse group of people brought together by the dig is changed by the experience, the result both of their encounters with the relics of history, and the personal encounters within the group. This is a dramatic and poetically written exploration of the interaction of past and present, and of the issues of age, race and gender which the excavation provokes. For all of the group there is the stark contrast between the beauty of the poetically evoked Jamaican landscape and the dark secrets lying underneath it."Jean Goulbourne's Excavation gives a refreshing perspective on a subject that has long troubled the West Indies - the nature of identity in a multiracial society haunted by a history of colonialism...Goulbourne's writing style is stimulating - especially in the portrayal of the island's landscape - and as she draws the reader into the lives of her characters, we gain a fresh perspective on West Indian culture, history, and politics."Geoffrey Philp, The Caribbean Writer.Jean Goulbourne grew up in rural Jamaica. She has worked as a teacher and a publications officer. She was the recipient of a James Michener Fellowship and an honorary fellowship at the Iowa Institute of Writing Programme.

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In these 'shrines of remembrance' for the millions of the victims of transatlantic slavery, Kwame Dawes constructs a sequence which laments, rages, mourns, but also celebrates survival. Focusing on individual moments in this holocaust which lasted nearly four hundred years, these poems both cauterize a lingering infection and offer the oil of healing. In these taut lyric pieces, Dawes achieves what might seem impossible: saying something fresh about a subject which, despite attempts at historical amnesia, will not go away. He does it by eschewing sentimentality, rant or playing to the audience, black or white. His poems go to the heart of the historical experience and its contemporary reverberations.This sequence was inspired by the award-winning book, The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo by the American artist Tom Feelings.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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In her fourth collection, Seni Seneviratne will extend her reputation as a fine poet whose incisive social and political concerns are matched by her meticulous care with the shape of each poem and the architecture of her collections, where individual poems are enriched by their place in the whole and their dialogue with each other. In this collection, the connecting thread is the bird, both in its observed physical otherness and as an image that carries cultural and historical resonances. In the first section of the collection, the imagery of the caged bird runs through a sequence of poems that meditate on the silenced voices of enslaved Black children, trapped as picturesque, consumerist trophies in those 18th century paintings to be found in English stately homes, which celebrate their occupants’ gaining of new wealth through the slave trade and slave-grown sugar. The second section of the collection yokes Seneviratne’s skills as a poet with her deep knowledge of the ways of birds in their natural environment – the freedom they possess in their otherness from human concerns. The final section revisits the myth of Philomena from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and puts this tongueless woman/nightingale in dialogue with the gender fluidity of Tiresias to explore different forms of silencing in history and the present. As a poet who balances careful observation with imaginative flight, Seni Seneviratne addresses both heart and mind.

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These stories have the virtue of taking the everyday lives of gay Trinidadian men utterly for granted in their searches for adventure, pleasure, self-realisation, loving contact and sex. Written with a sharpness of perception and in a variety of engaging personal voices, these narratives find room for humour, tragic haircuts, and a connection between tattoos and terrible poetry. But they also acknowledge very real fears in a society where there is still prejudice, discrimination and homophobic violence. The narrator of several of these pieces is a writer who wants to focus on the pleasures and inner dramas of these lives as the truth about gay experience. But there are also the stories of brutal murders reported with coy innuendo in the press. If he is tempted to see his lovers as characters in a witty fiction of manners, is this the novel that can be written in Trinidad? And since this is Trinidad, could the conflicted, self-hating Dorian really be a serial killer? But then when one of Bagoo’s writer narrators unwittingly alarms his writing buddies by the freedom of his gothic imagination, who knows what might be true. Not for nothing does the author include the singer Kate Bush with her Wuthering Heights in his acknowledgements. Bagoo’s stories offer a witty and incisive portrait of contemporary Trinidad in all its intersections of race, class and gender politics. Not least, they have a strong sense of place – Bagoo’s gay Woodbrook offers a fine sequel to V.S. Naipaul’s Woodbrook in his classic Miguel Street.

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Wandeka Gayle's mostly young black women protagonists win our hearts as risk-taking, adventurous explorers of the white world, away from home, which at some point has been Jamaica. They include Roxanne who starts work in a care home in London, who strikes up a rapport with a depressed old man who used to be a writer; Ayo who heads to college in Louisiana, and fights off the internalised voice of her godly, tambourine-beating aunt to begin an affair with an engaging, slightly older white man; there's Sophia who comes to work in Georgia, who struggles to know whether her inability to engage more deeply with other people is really about racism or, rather, a more personally embedded reluctance. What characterises these women is a readiness to encounter, an attempt to get to grips with the oddities and strangeness of the white world, and like Ayo to engage with it, whilst being pretty sure that Forrest "could never understand her world". They take risks and are sometimes forced to pay for their courage. Other characters have to confront situations of their own making, like Angela returning from the USA for her mother's funeral, trying to find some point of contact with the now almost

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Proverbial 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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Raphael earns his living as a butcher in a hillside village in rural Trinidad. He is also a would-be author, but there have been so many distractions to the novel he has been writing for forty-one years that many of the characters have lost patience and gone off to do their own thing. But somehow, miraculously, the novel, as Raphael has planned it in one hundred chapters of a thousand words, seems to write itself...Time in this richly ambitious and multi-levelled novel is both circular and simultaneous, but moving, as Raphael ages, towards a sense of dissolution both of persons and of the culture of the village. But if there is a tragic realism about the passage of time, there is also a constant aliveness in the novel’s love affair with the language of Creole Trinidad with its poetic inventiveness and wit, with the improvisatory sounds of jazz and the undimmed urge of the villagers to create meaning in their lives. Above all, there is Raphael’s belief that in the making of his fiction, however messy and disobedient its materials, art can both challenge the destructive passage of time and make us see reality afresh.

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Since the mid-1960s, Gordon Rohlehr has been an incomparable recorder and analyser of Caribbean literature and culture and their intersection with history and politics. His work on the emergence of Caribbean writing from its colonial shell and his analysis of calypso as the voice of Trinidadian consciousness establishes him as essential to our time as William Hazlitt was to the early 19th century in documenting and characterising the turbulent spirit of his age. Radical, but never willing to compromise his sense of what was fraudulent or power-seeking amongst his fellow travellers, Rohlehr is the best touchstone we have for both what the Caribbean has achieved and of its struggling, neo-colonial fragility in the face of the new imperialism of economic and cultural globalism.Now – though who knows? – in putting together what he says is his last book, Gordon Rohlehr doffs the costume of the carnival figure of the “Bookman”, the recording Satan of the devil band, who walks with his book in which he writes down the names of the damned. And here we have the clue to the fact that along with the serious analysis of calypso, his summing up of what is essential in the work of Derek Walcott, Earl Lovelace and V.S. Naipaul, and the essays of remembrance for those like Walcott, Lloyd Best, Pat Bishop, Tony Martin and others who have made their earthly exits, there is a devilish humour at work. This comes out particularly in an essay that joyfully demolishes an attempt to characterise the Caribbean in any other than its own terms – as a new Mediterranean, for instance – and the subservience of Trinidad’s rulers to the neo-colonialisms of tourism, visiting American ships and the U.S. embassy. What is often salutary, if uncomfortable, is to be reminded by the long span of Rohlehr’s observations that problems seen as contemporary were being identified by the nation’s calypsonians sixty years ago. Rohlehr’s voice is always distinctively personal, though the Bookman has rarely revealed much of himself, but in one of the concluding essays he writes about his Guyanese upbringing from the 1940s to the 1960s in a way that is both very funny and sad and gives an understanding of what has shaped his vision.

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The Murders of Boysie Singh, first published in 1962, is a classic for several reasons. It tells the true but almost unbelievable story of a Trinidadian badjohn who in the 1940s and 1950s was a much reported celebrity of the criminal and legal world. Believed to have committed scores of murders in his guise as a pirate who dumped would-be migrants from Trinidad to Venezuela overboard to the sharks, he was hanged for just one proven crime, a murder he in fact may not have done, and for which no body was found. The story that Derek Bickerton tells is a classic because it both focuses on themes that remain pertinent to Trinidadian culture and reminds the reader that current alarms about crime and an escalating murder rate are very far from new. Bickerton recognizes in Boysie Singh a particularly Trinidadian villain, one who for several decades evaded the law in part because of a popular ambivalence about crime. What was seen as "smartness" in challenging a deeply hierarchical colonial society was often admired, even if its victims were not from the elite.

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Honeyfish confronts life and death. The collection begins and ends with poems that memorialise and mourn the deaths of African Americans who have died at police hands, though to call them poems of protest would simplify their exploration of what life means in relation to death. It is a collection whose architecture works to make each poem, beautiful in their singular grace, add up to much more than the sum of their individual parts. Thus, the poems that explore the complexities of a life that involves the dislocations of migration, the pain of racism and misogyny and the sometimes fraught complications of love and family life speak all the more strongly of the value of a determined engagement with life because of their relationship to the poems that address the suddenness of death.

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Gordon Rohlehr’s critical work is outstanding in the balance it achieves between its particularity and its breadth – from the detailed unpacking of a poem’s inner workings, to locating Caribbean writing in the sweep of political and cultural history – and the equal respect he pays to literary and to popular cultural forms. His “Articulating a Caribbean Aesthetic” remains a stunningly pertinent and concise account of the historical formation of the cultural shifts that framed Caribbean writing as a distinctive body of work. Indeed, along with Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter and Kenneth Ramchand, no critic has done more to establish the subject of Caribbean writing and its distinctive aesthetics. These essays, written between 1969 to 1986, first published in radical campaigning newspapers such as Tapia and Moko, and first collected in 1992, were the work of a young academic who was both changing the university curriculum, and deeply engaged with the less privileged world outside the campus. Rohlehr catches Caribbean writing at the point when it leaves behind its nationalist hopes and begins to challenge the complex realities of independence. Few critics have written as clearly about how deeply the colonial has remained embedded in the postcolonial.What shines in Rohlehr’s work is not merely its depth, acuity and humanity, but its courage. He writes when his subject is still emergent, without waiting for the credibility of metropolitan endorsements as a guide to the canon. “My Strangled City”, a record of how Trinidad’s poets responded to the upsurge of revolutionary hopes, radical shams, repressions and disappointed dreams of 1964-1975 is an indispensable account of those times and the diversity of literary response that continues to speak to the present. And if in these essays Trinidad is Rohlehr’s primary focus, his perspective is genuinely regional. His native Guyana is always present in his thoughts and several essays show his deep interest in the cultural productions of a “dread” Jamaica, and in making insightful comparisons between, for instance, reggae and calypso.

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In a collection that encompasses both Siri and the trickster god Anansi, in his travels from West Africa via the Caribbean to Black working class communities in the Midlands and North East of England, Degna Stone demonstrates not only how well she tells stories, but also of her awareness of the difficulties of communication, where “You know what he’s saying / but not what he’s getting at”, or where the injunction against lying doesn’t count in every situation. But if human interactions are at the heart of her poems, she also writes with telling precision about both place and animal nature. Not since Ted Hughes has anyone written so totemically about the crow, ominous, but also emblematic of tenacity, boldness and a harsh kind of beauty. When the poet declares, “I want to be as black as the crows”, it is much more than an embrace of blackness in resistance to prejudice. “It's a cliche of poetry that we often say that it transforms the ordinary; this pamphlet disproves this, showing us that the ordinary and everyday have always been transformational, and Degna's poems allow us to see that. These are poems written from the outskirts -- of cities, of love, of the body -- with a pure distillation of language where no word is wasted.”Andrew McMillan

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Poetry 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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Black British Music and the people who made it, from Tudor times to the mid '60s.This is a story of empire, colonialism and then the new energies released by the movements for freedom and independence of the post second-world-war years; of the movements of peoples across borders; of the flow of music around the triangle that takes in Africa, the Caribbean, the USA and Great Britain; of temporary but highly influential visitors like Paul Robeson; and of the settlement of ex-colonial peoples who brought their music to Britain, and changed its forms and concerns in the new context. It is the story of institutions like the military that provided spaces for black musicians, but it is also the story of individuals like John Blanke, the black trumpeter in the court of Henry VIII, Ignatius Sancho the composer and friend of Laurence Sterne in the 18th century, early nineteenth century street performers such as Joseph Johnson and Billy Waters, child prodigies such as George Bridgewater and composers such as Samuel Coleridge-Taylor in the later 19th whose music is still played today. Above all, it is the story of those individuals who changed the face of British music in the post-war period, who collectively fertilized British jazz, popular music and street theatre in ways that continue to evolve in the present. This is the story of the Windrush generation who brought calypso and steelband to Britain’s streets, Caribbean jazz musicians such as Joe Harriot and Shake Keane, or escapees from apartheid South Africa, such as Chris McGregor and Dudu Pukwana who brought modernity and the sounds of Soweto to British jazz, and a later generation who gave ska and reggae distinctive British accents. Based on extensive research and many first-hand interviews, one of the great virtues of Kevin Le Gendre’s book is lack of London-centricity, its recognition that much important development took place in cities such as Manchester, Leeds and Bristol. As a noted reviewer of black music for the BBC, the Independent, Echoes and other journals, Le Gendre brings together both a sense of historical purpose and the ability to actually describe music in vivid and meaningful ways.

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With the republication of Garth St Omer's novels, around fifty years after their original publication, a new generation of readers has been discovering how modern a writer he is, whilst others have been remembering just how good the novels are. These qualities are documented in this casebook that brings together reviews from the time of first publication, later critical assessments, personal memories and contemporary re-assessments of St Omer's small but important body of work.

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Winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, The Pain Tree is Olive Senior at her very best, unforgettable short stories set in Jamaica and Canada, now available in this beautiful UK and Caribbean edition from Peepal Tree Press.Olive Senior’s new collection of stories, The Pain Tree, is wide-ranging in scope, time period, theme, locale, and voice. There is — along with her characteristic “gossipy voice” — reverence, wit and wisdom, satire, humour, and even farce. The stories range over at most a hundred years, from around the time of the second world war to the present. Like her earlier stories, Jamaica is the setting but the range of characters presented are universally recognisable as people in crisis or on the cusp of transformation.While most of the stories operate within a realist mode, Senior also exploits traditional motifs. Collected here are revenge stories (“The Goodness of my Heart”), a bargain with the Devil (“Boxed-in”), a Cinderella story (“The Country Cousin”), a magical realist interpretation of African spiritual beliefs (“Flying”) and a narrator’s belated acceptance of the healing power of traditional beliefs (“The Pain Tree”). “Coal” is a realist story set in the war years and depression that followed as folks try to find a new place in the world. Senior’s trademark children awakening to self-awareness and to the hypocrisy of adults are here too, from the heartbreaking “Moonlight” and “Silent” to the girls in “Lollipop” and “A Father Like That” who learn to confront loneliness and vulnerability with attitude.

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In Trinidad, oil wealth supported the growth of probably the most prosperous and conspicuously consuming middle-class in the Caribbean. But there was a price to pay for the deepened social inequalities that resulted: a deep paranoia rooted in the fear of crime and social upheaval.The recent plunge in world oil prices has left these people in a double bind. Travel and education overseas have given them tastes that weaken their attachment to Trinidad, yet they know that their privileges of race and class would disappear in North America. As one narrator acknowledges, in the US she’s the only black girl in most of her classes, “though at home no one would call me black.”Four Taxis Facing North presents us with an intimate, human face to what it is like to be one of those middle class Trinidadians. These stories focus on characters from both sides of the social divide – and their infrequent and often uncomfortable interactions. Even as they are beset by fears about the future, the Walcott-Hackshaw’s women are also busy with their responsibilities, their relationships with husbands, partners, children, friends and foes. They deal with absent, unfaithful or abusive husbands and display differing degrees of self and social awareness.Four Taxis Facing North offers few comforting illusions. Hackshaw explores characters who are not always sympathetic – and the title story imagines a Trinidad after a great social upheaval in which survival means life of the bleakest kind. But the twelve stories in this collection offer great clarity and a deeply satisfying exactness of language in the creation of characters across the divisions of Trinidadian society.This collection presents us with a moral vision that is both necessary and bracing, prophetic but not preachy.With an introduction by Lawrence Scott.

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When the infant Jordan Sant is taken to the St Asteria Home for Children after the murder of his parents, he sets out on a journey that is a constant struggle between his best and worst selves. One relationship, with the young nun the children call Mouse, awakens the possibilities of love and hope, but when Mouse abandons her calling and leaves the home, the world thereafter becomes a darker place. When, barely a teenager, he runs away from the home to scuffle for a living in the frightening underbelly of Port of Spain, Jordan reaches the lower depths of both Trinidadian society and himself. In Jordan Sant, Kevin Jared Hussein creates a narrator who gets under your skin. He takes us into the most dreadful places of human experience, confesses doing seemingly unforgivable things. But though Jordan knows how inescapable circumstance can be, he never denies responsibility for his actions. But can this Dostoyevskian figure save himself? The Repenters takes us to places in Trinidad readers will have never been before. In Kevin Hosein the Caribbean announces a writer whose work is poetic, Gothic, and deeply transgressive, whose creation of a voice for Jordan Sant is troubling, engrossing and not to be forgotten.

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"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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Strange Fruit is the latest poetry collection by experimental Caribbean poet and theorist Kamau Brathwaite.

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Anthony Kellman has created a warmly human work of historical fiction. He locates it between the trace of a satirical folk song, ridiculing the old African king’s affair with his Barbadian servant, and the official records of the illegal kidnapping and exile to the Caribbean of Jubo Jubogha, the King of Opobo, who stood in the way of British imperial interests in the palm-oil rich region of the Niger delta. The novel focuses on the last four months of Jaja’s life and the ironies of his position in Barbados where Whites dominated all aspects of life and race prejudice was nakedly expressed, but where many Black Barbadians were piqued to discover the presence of an African king amongst them.At the heart of the novel is an entirely human drama in which, though his relationship with young Becka brings new life to his battered body and spirit, and the Barbadian landscape lifts his despair, the king never loses his sense of the injustice done to him or gives up on his urgent desire to return home. Anthony Kellman writes with subtle psychological insights into a relationship that crosses ages and cultures, and with a poet’s perception of the natural beauties of his own island.

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"When in 1845 the German-American inventor John Adolphus Etzler claims to have created a machine that can harness the power of nature to free people from the drudgery of labour, he is met by both scepticism and hope.Based on a real historical figure and the actual journey he made from England to Trinidad with the motley crew of followers he recruits in Britain, Robert Antoni’s novel is a brilliant exploration of the persistence of dreams and the individual human stories that underlie Etzler’s quest. In particular, Antoni’s creation of Willy, one of the younger utopians, is a tragi-comic tour-de-force in revealing his contrary impulses—between young love for the sparky Marguerite, loyalty to his family as they discover the life-threatening realities of the tropical paradise, and his fascination with Trinidad and Etzler’s utopian dream.Not least of the novel’s attractions is the richly comic account of its researching, in the titanic battles between the unscrupulous researcher and the librarian who will protect her photocopier, though not her virtue, with her life. How this prose epic of Trinidad’s history connects to the present is a matter for the reader to deduce – but connect it does, in many satirical ways.

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This novel, loosely inspired by Flaubert's Madame Bovary, focuses on the life of an upper middle class family in modern day Trinidad.The island, independent since 1962, still struggles with its multiethnic and multicultural complexities, and is fraught with corruption and violence. The heroine, Mrs. B (Marie Elena Butcher), is fast approaching 50. In her mid-life she is forced to admit that neither Ruthie, her daughter, nor her marriage to Charles Butcher, has met her expectations of being both a mother and a wife. Haunted by an affair with her husband's best friend, above all Mrs. B knows that she has disappointed herself.Much like Flaubert's heroine, Mrs. B's life is based on longing for what can never be realized and by an inability to adapt to the pressures of her own bourgeois society.Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw is a Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone Literatures, The University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago. She has published various academic titles and her first collection of short stories was published in 2007.This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.

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Collected here are three plays written over four decades that take an unflinching look at life in postcolonial Jamaica.Cumper began writing plays when she was in her twenties. Reviews of her contribution to black theatre are included in publications by Oxford University Press, Heinemann and Collins. Cumper's plays have often been called 'theatre of the people'. When she first moved to Britain, she struggled to have her work shown, despite winning four awards by this point in the Caribbean. Cumper has since been commissioned by Carib Theatre Company, Talawa Theatre Company, The Royal Court, Blue Mountain Theatre, BBC Radio 4 and the World Service.Patricia Cumper is an award winning playwright, producer, director, arts administrator and cultural leader who led Talawa Theatre Company for six years as Artistic Director and CEO. She was awarded an MBE for services to Black British theatre. She is a passionate advocate for the arts and is an experienced and highly articulate cultural commentator who has worked in radio for more than twenty years as a writer, contributor and presenter. Cumper's radio adaptation of The Colour Purple won a silver Sony Award.

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After years in Europe Peter returns unexpectedly to his West Indian home to renew contacts with people from his past.: former lovers, schoolmates, and teachers - his mother and the wife he had more or less abandoned. The island has changed with it: not always for the better.

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Interlocking Basins of a Globe is a fascinating new study of the first Caribbean writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Derek Walcott. The essays range from critical discussion of Walcott's earliest poetry in Twenty-Five Poems (1948) to his most recent collections exploring the approach of old age, The Prodigal (Faber, 2006) and White Egrets (Faber, 2011).The reflections also extend beyond his poetry, to include his drama, rhetoric, essays and criticism. The contributors are: Patrick Anthony, Jean Antoine-Dunne, Edward Baugh, Rhonda Cobham Sander, Rachel Friedman, George B. Handley, Harold McDermott, Antonia McDonald, Kenneth Ramchand, Louis Regis and Gordon Rohlehr.Jean Antoine-Dunne is a Senior Lecturer in Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine. She is a former Unilever Newman Scholar in Film and Modern Literature at University College, Dublin. She is one of the editors of the Journal of West Indian Literature, and a practicing painter.

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In Grenada in 1968, Dr Hilda Bynoe was appointed as one of the very first local governors in the Caribbean in the years just before formal independence, and the first woman, and black woman, to be appointed a governor anywhere in the Commonwealth. All previous governors had been white, male and British. The circumstances of her governorship in Grenada placed her at the heart of local, regional and international change, and later of conflict.Based on interviews with Dame Hilda, Merle Collins explores the wider themes of ancestry, the small nation state and regional identity, and race in Dr Bynoe's conception of her role. It provides an insightful portrayal of not just an exceptional woman, but the emergence of a new Caribbean middle class, many of whom emigrated to the UK in the 1940s and 1950s, a journey rarely described from a female perspective.Merle Collins was born in 1950 in Aruba. Her novels are Angel, set during the US invasion of Grenada in 1983, published in 1987 and re-issued by Peepal Tree in 2010, and The Colour of Forgetting (Virago, 1985). Her short-story collection The Ladies are Upstairs was published by Peepal Tree in 2011. She teaches Caribbean Literature at the University of Maryland.

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Following in the committed political footsteps of the late, great Adrian Mitchell, and delighting in the kind of punk wordplay that brought fame to John Cooper Clarke, Sai Murray has built an enthusiastic audience for his dramatic poetry performances. Challenging the status quo, his poems take on the age of consumerism and, as befitting a reformed ad-man, the worlds of advertising and shopping. He also delivers parodies of the language of the Red Tops, the clichés of our political rulers, the trivialisations of Facebook, and the burying of history in a Caribbean made fit for tourists.Sai Murray's poems range wide, but all have at their centre the desire to cauterise the deceits of language, and find a world full of wit and warmth, liberty and fraternity."A captivating performer, and a brilliant, thought-provoking, wordsmith." Dorothea Smartt"A truly original voice."Courttia NewlandSai Murray is a writer, poet and graphic designer of Bajan/Afrikan/English heritage. In a former life he worked in advertising – he has been clean for over 13 years and now works with selected grassroots community organisations through his artist/activist promotions agency, Liquorice Fish. The first part of his debut novel, Kill Myself Now: The True Confessions of An Advertising Genius was published by the Inscribe imprint of Peepal Tree Press (2008).Sai is currently a member of digital arts collective Virtual Migrants; a resident poet at Numbi; a facilitator on Platform's youth arts and campaigning project Shake!; creative writing facilitator/mentor with mental health arts charity Artists in Mind; the Arts and Politics Editor of Sable LitMag; and Artistic Director of Scarf magazine.He has performed and collaborated with musicians across the UK, Barbados and USA; and has been poet coach of winning slam teams at Leeds Young Authors' Voices of a New Generation 2009 and 2010, and the GSAL Speak Up Slam 2012. In 2012 he coached his school team to win the biggest ever national UK youth slam, Shake the Dust.Find him online at saimurai.wordpress.com and ad-liberation.tumblr.com.

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In Jubilation!, over fifty contemporary Jamaican poets reflect in complex, outspoken, meditative, humorous and outrageous ways on Jamaican independence from Britain and the years that followed.The anthology includes work from the best-known poets of the last fifty years, as well as some of the new and exciting voices in Jamaican poetry today. The authors featured include the work of, among others, Opal Palmer Adisa, Jean 'Binta' Breeze, Kwame Dawes, Ann-Margaret Lim, Rachel Manley, Shara McCallum, Mervyn Morris, Velma Pollard and Ralph Thompson.Kwame Dawes is the author of over thirty books, and is widely recognised as one of the Caribbean's leading writers. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Musgrave Silver Medal, the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award 2012 and, most recently, a Guggenheim Fellowship. His latest poetry book is Wheels (2011), and he recently edited Red: Contemporary Black British Poetry (2010) and A Bloom of Stones: A Trilingual Anthology of Haitian Poems After the Earthquake (2012), all published by Peepal Tree Press.

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In 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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The circumstances of their brother’s violent death inflicts such a wound on his family that its four oldest sisters feel compelled to come together to write, tell or imagine what led up to it, to unravel conflicting versions for the benefit of the younger generation of the huge Pointy-Morris clan.From the richly distinctive voices of the writer Micheline (Mitch), who could never tell a straight truth, the self-contained and sceptical Beatrice (B), the visionary and prophetic Evangeline (Vangie), and the severely practical Cynthia (Peaches), the novel builds a haunting sequence of narratives around the obsessive love of their brother, Pete, for his dazzling cousin, Tramadol, and its tragic aftermath.Set on the Caribbean island of Jacaranda at different points in a disturbing future, Ghosts weaves a counterpoint between the family wound and a world caught between amazing technological progress and the wounds global warming inflicts on an agitated planet.In a lyrical flow between English and Jamaican Creole, Ghosts catches the ear and gently invades the heart. Love enriches and heals, but its thwarting is revealed as the most painful of emotions. Yet if deep sadness is at the core of the novel, there are also moments of exuberant humour.Curdella Forbes is the critically-acclaimed Jamaican author of Songs of Silence (2002); a collection for younger readers, Flying with Icarus and Other Stories (2003); and more recently A Permanent Freedom (Peepal Tree, 2008). She is currently Professor of Caribbean Literature at Howard University, and lives in Takoma Park, Maryland.

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