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Johnnie Sobert is a brown Jamaican who earns his living as a barman in a Soho club. Sobert is a man divided: between Black and White; between class identities; between heterosexual and homosexual desires; between being an exiled Jamaican and an incipient Black Londoner. Against the background of bedsitter Hampstead and bohemian Soho, Sobert attempts to be, as he describes himself, a 'nigger with coolth' but the reality is that his wisecracking persona is an all too transparent cover for his uncertainties. He embarks on an unsatisfactory affair with his landlady, Fiona, which makes him uncomfortably aware of the stereotype of black desire for 'white pussy', and then goes to live with his gay friend Dick. The novel ends with Johnnie yet to make a decision about where his desires really lie.Introduction by Thomas Glave.

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In these stories of Indian life in Trinidad in the 1940s and 50s, Ismith Khan brings to vivid life the morning smells of eggplant frying in coconut oil, and herrings baking in the embers of the earthen fireplace; childhoods such as Pooran's, who has to make his way between the poetic mythology of the pundit and the cold, rationalistic materialism of his science teacher, or 'Thiney Boney' who, newly arrived in Port of Spain from the country, has to choose between his new Creole friends and his father's harsh moral certainties. These are not comfortable childhoods, and several stories show the pressures of poverty and despair leading to the abuse of children by their parents. Stories deal with the trauma of urbanisation as Indians are drawn from the country to Port of Spain, though even in the villages, where the shining metal of the oil refineries dwarfs the grasscutter tending his oxen, old ways must change. Ismith Khan brings a tender and affecting style to stories of troubled childhoods, questioning youth and adult struggle. This is beautiful writing to savour beyond place and time."The brilliant short story 'A Day in the Country' has a home in my heart. It reminded me of the intense, uplifting genius of Thomas Wolfe's (1900-1938) short story 'Circus at Dawn'. In both stories the concentration on life, on living, on things seen, heard and felt, is so full and rich that plot becomes unnecessary. But 'A Day in the Country' is much more than a generous slice of life, and it does much more than revel in secure country childhood, or celebrate boyhood in the countryside. It makes a moving, ominous communication about the unsheltering of Trinidad, about its unprepared journey, from the 'Drinking Rum and Coca Cola' years of the 40s and 50s to the bewildering, homogeneous brutality of the 20th century."Keith Jardim, The Trinidad GuardianIsmith Khan was born in Trinidad in 1925. He is the author of The Jumbie Bird and The Obeah Man. He lived in New York until his death in 2002.

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'There are many who date the day he took to walking as the beginning of his madness. But others mark it as the beginning of that other walk when, patiently, and bit by bit, he began tracing the secret blueprint of a new city...'He is Brothero-Man, one of the pioneer jumping-ship men, who landed in the East End and lived by bending the English language to the umpteenth degree. He, 'the invisible surveyor of the city' must complete his walk before the mascatchers in white coats intercept him and take him away.These stories, set in London's Banglatown and Bangladesh, bring startlingly fresh insights to the experiences of exile and settlement. Written between realism and fantasy, acerbic humour and delicate grace, they explore the lives of exiles and settlers, traders and holy men, transvestite hemp-smoking actors and the leather-jacketed, pool-playing youths who defended Brick Lane from skinhead incursion. In the title story, Islam makes dazzling use of the metaphor of map-making as Brothero-Man, 'galloping the veins of your city' becomes the collective consciousness of all the settlers inscribing their realities on the parts of Britain they are claiming as their own.Syed Manzurul (Manzu) Islam was born in 1953 in a small northeastern town in East Pakistan (later Bangladesh). He has a doctorate and was Reader in English at the University of Gloucestershire, specialising in postcolonial literature and creative writing

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Creative Freedom: The FWords anthology, features new work by eight of Yorkshire's most talented literary and visual artists. The writers and artists were asked to respond to the Parliamentary Act of 1807 to abolish the British Slave Trade, focusing on the theme of Freedom.Addressing a wide range of subjects – from oppression and restitution in 19th-century and contemporary South Africa to wry reflections on the thirst for freedom from a formerly imprisoned poet – this collection is an elegant exploration of the true meaning of liberation and its ironies in modern society. "Who belongs and who does not belong to 'England's concrete jungle?' The work of these writers demonstrates not only do they belong, they also feel a powerful freedom to rewrite the story in a manner which makes sense to them." Caryl Phillips"Intelligent, witty, wry and passionate, the contents of 'FWords' are a salutary reminder of the need to redefine and remake continually what we mean by 'freedom'…" Professor Shirley Chew – Editor: Moving Worlds.Tanya Chan-Sam, Khadijah Ibrahiim, Jack Mapanje, Simon Murray, Seni Seneviratne, Rommi Smith, and visual artists Fosuwa Andoh & Seyi Ogunjobi.

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Caribbean Passion is feisty, sensuous and thought provoking -- everything one expects from Opal Palmer Adisa. Whether writing about history, Black lives, family, or love and sexual passion, she has an acute eye for the contraries of experience. Her Caribbean has a dynamic that draws from its dialectic of oppression and resistance; her childhood includes both the affirmation of parents that makes her 'leap fences' and the 'jeer of strange men on the street/that made your feet stumble'; and men are portrayed both as predators and as the objects of erotic desire.This vision of contraries is rooted in an intensely sensuous apprehension of the physical world. She observes the Caribbean's foods and flora with exactness; makes them emblematic metaphors that are often rewardingly oblique; and uses them as starting points for engagingly conversational meditations on aspects of remembered experience. There is a witty play between food and sexuality, but counterpointing her celebration of the erotic, there is a keen sense of the oppression of the female body. In her poem 'Bumbu Clat', for instance, she explores the deformation of a word that originally signified 'sisterhood' to become part of the most transgressive and misogynist curse in Jamaican society. In this doubleness of vision, the term 'womanist' was invented to describe Opal Palmer Adisa's work.Opal Palmer Adisa is a Jamaica-born, award-winning poet, educator and storyteller. Anthologised in over 100 publications, she is a regular performer of her work throughout the USA and presently lives in Oakland, California, when she is not traveling.

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Tapan Ali falls in love with England and a student life of pot-smoking and philosophy. When the money to keep him runs out there seems no option but to return to Bangladesh until Adela, a fellow student, offers to marry him. But this marriage of convenience collapses and Tapan finds himself thrust into another England, the East London of Bangladeshi settlement and National Front violence.Now an 'illegal', Tapan becomes a deshi bhai, supported by a network of friends like Sundar Mia, who becomes his guide, anti-Nazi warrior Masuk Ali, wise Brother Josef K, and, sharing the centre of the novel, his lover, Nilufar Mia, a community activist who has broken with her family to live out her alternative destiny. Tapan has to become a mole, able to smell danger and feel his way through the dark passageways and safe houses where the Bangladeshi community has mapped its own secret city. He must evade the informers like Poltu Khan, the 'rat' who sells illegals to the Immigration. But being a mole has its costs, and Tapan cannot burrow forever, at some moment he must emerge into the light. But how can a mole fly?Manzu Islam has important things to say about immigration and race, but his instincts are always those of a storyteller. Using edgy realism, fantasy and humour to compulsively readable effect, he tells a warm and enduring tale of journeys and secrets, of love, family, memory, fear and betrayal.Syed Manzurul (Manzu) Islam was born in 1953 in a small northeastern town in East Pakistan (later Bangladesh). He has a doctorate and was Reader in English at the University of Gloucestershire, specialising in postcolonial literature and creative writing

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Anson Gonzalez's prose poems criss-cross the crossroads between dream and conscious awareness. They set the reader on a surreal adventure into the mental journeys of a persona for whom the inner and outer worlds are a seamless universe. There is no order to the presentation of the prose poems; they take their own twists and turns. The poems are lyrical, tell stories and explore a lifetime of reflective concern with life's conundrums: love, ageing, finding an inner purpose, being Trinidadian -- and sometimes feeling out of step with the temper of the times. These poems are the work of one who hears a different drummer and their tone is sometimes sardonic, and even cynical -- though always with a wry, self- deprecating humour. Above all, the twinkle in the tone suggests a healthy appreciation for humour of fickle fate or capricious gods. While there is ultimately no didactic purpose -- the mind leads and the poet follows -- these globules of consciousness in action both illuminate and delight.Anson Gonzalez is a Trinidadian poet, critic, publisher and encourager of countless writing careers.

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Covering more than four decades in the lives of Guyanese at home or in Britain and Canada, these stories have an intensive and rewarding inner focus on a character at a point of crisis. Harold is celebrating the victory of the political party he supports whilst confronting a sense of his own powerlessness; Jacob has been sent back to Guyana from Britain after suffering a mental breakdown; Chuni, a worker at the university, is confused by the climate of revolutionary sloganizing which masks the true situation: the rise of a new middle class, elevated by their loyalty to the ruling party. This class, as the maid, Vera, recognises, are simply the old masters with new Black faces.The stories in the second half of the collection echo the experience of many thousands who fled from the political repression, corruption and social collapse of the 70s and 80s. The awareness of the characters is shot through with Guyanese images, voices and unanswered questions. It is through these that their new experiences of Britain and North America are filtered. One character lies in a hospital in London fighting for her life, but hears the voices of her childhood in Guyana – her mother, African Miss K, the East Indian pandit and the English Anglican priest. Once again, they 'war for the role of guide in her life'. In 'The Godmother' and 'Hopscotch', childhood friends reunite in London. Two have stayed in Guyana, while one has settled in London. The warmth of shared memories and cold feelings of betrayal, difference and loss vie for dominance in their interactions. These stories crystallize the shifts in Guyana's uncomfortable fortunes in the post-colonial period, and while they are exact and unsparing in their truth-telling, there are always layers of complexity that work through their realistic surfaces: a sensitivity to psychological undertones, the evocative power of memory and a poetic sense of the Guyanese physical space.Jan Lowe Shinebourne was born in Guyana and now lives in Sussex, U.K. She is writing her fourth work, a family saga spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; set in China, Europe and the Caribbean.

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Stanley Greaves is without question one of the Caribbean's most distinguished artists and this critical monograph is both a long overdue investigation and appreciation of his work and an important contribution to the still small body of Caribbean writing about art. Roopnaraine's approach takes as its starting point Greaves' own reference to 'the primacy of the eye as a means of defining fundamentals of a Caribbean experience that cuts through or transcends the history of colonialism'. Roopnaraine's is in the first place an exploration of Stanley Greaves' highly original visual language, but one which draws attention to the significance of Greaves' practice in bringing together elements from visual resources that range across traditional African and Amerindian art and contemporary European surrealism. Again, whilst this is in the first place a description and analysis of the visual and the importance for Greaves of the physical materials he works in, Roopnaraine never loses sight of the fact that Greaves is a Guyanese artist with explicit, though never overdetermining cultural and political concerns. Chapters explore the roots of Greaves' art in Guyanese physical reality ('If all other records of modern Guyanese life were to disappear, a study of Greaves' paintings of compassion of the fifties and sixties would be enough to tell us how we lived...'); his work in sculpture and ceramics; the impact of his explorations of the bush of the Guyanese interior and a move into more abstract spacial concerns; his return to figure paintings and an extensive investigation of the folk resources of Caribbean art; his visual response to the desolate years of political dictatorship and social collapse in the Guyana of the 1980s in a more explicitly 'readable' art; and the art of his more recent years of inner exploration and what has been described as a Caribbean metaphysic. The book is illustrated with 78 full colour images of Greaves' paintings, sculptures and ceramics and black and white illustrations from his notebooks.Roopnaraine's monograph will be of major interest not only to those concerned with Caribbean art, but to those with wider postcolonial interests in the creolising process.Rupert Roopnaraine was born in 1943 in Guyana. He is political leader of the W.P.A., a film-maker, art critic and fomer cricketer.

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From beginnings secreted in the folds of her mother's sari, transplanted to England to struggle with the rough musicality of Mancunian vowels, Raman Mundair, a Punjabi Alice, found no true reflection of herself, no wonderland, but mirrors which dissolved, shrank and obscured her size. In these poems she creates her own universe and dissects its realities in all their complex, tragic and surreal forms.At the heart of the collection is an acute sensitivity to the body: hurt, aroused, desired, ignored. Her poems spill out from this centre: to the physical memory of domestic violence, the intense joys of intimacy and love, and the pain of their rejection, to a passionate concern with the body politic. Here, whether her focus is on the non-sense of religious exclusion, the seismic fault of partition that continues to tremor, or the racist murders of Stephen Lawrence and Ricky Reel, the approach is oblique, metaphorical, observant of the details that carry the poems beyond political statement. For Mundair, there is, too, a world beyond Britain, seen with more than just a vivid eye for the ironies and pleasures of travel.Raman Mundair's voice encompasses the most delicate, shimmering images and a raw, abrasive, sometimes angry energy. There is a probing intellect at work that arranges the world in new ways, and a sensuous truth to feeling that puts the reader inside the experience of the poems. Each poem has its own distinctiveness, but there is also an architecture that makes the collection a satisfying whole.There is room, too, for a sense of the absurd and a macabre sense of humour. How would you deal with the thief of your heart?"She is constantly sensual... tempered by a delicate care for detail, a quality of consideration that engages in the philosophical in sometimes complex ways..." - Kwame DawesRaman Mundair is a writer and artist. She was born in Ludhiana, India and came to live in the UK at the age of five. She is the author of two volumes of poetry, A Choreographer's Cartography and Lovers, Liars, Conjurers and Thieves.

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Since Kwame Dawes first published his prestigious Forward Poetry prize-winning Progeny of Air in 1994, six further collections have followed which have changed the face of Caribbean poetry. New and Selected Poems contains a generous selection from all these volumes, and a book's worth of new poems.Sensitive to the dusty savannahs of Ghana (where he was born), the hills and city streets of Jamaica (where he grew up), the 'low-riding, swamp' landscapes of South Carolina (where he lives) and the landscapes of England (where he regularly visits), Dawes has been building an enthusiastic readership in the UK, the Caribbean and the USA.New and Selected Poems does not replace the earlier collections. Indeed, the selections here will whet the appetite of those who have not yet discovered them to encounter their individual, organic and rewarding architectures and for those familiar with the earlier books, this selection will suggest new ways of reading them.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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For the characters in these stories, the mark is about to buss. Events have come to a head and decisions have to be made. Sixteen year old Paul, aka 'Umpire', discovers not only that he has a half-brother, but that he is coming to share his home. How is he to keep this cuckoo out of his life without attracting his mother's wrath? Mama Pala and her fourteen hungry-belly children have hit financial rock bottom. Can she humble herself enough to coax a little money from snooty Cousin Gloria? Soraya waits for her husband's return, trapped in her East End tower-block by the racist graffiti in the lift. Taiwanese student Li Li, alone and pregnant in London, takes desperate action. In Miami, Jamaican Basil confronts his homophobia when his 'batty boy' son comes home, and how long can Erma get away with her infidelities?These stories, written by Caribbean and Black British writers, share a common concern with the experiences of migration, poverty, racism and sexism, with human fragility and human strength. They range from the comic to the tragic in their telling. The stories speak of different places, different cultures, but what animates the writing is the concern with people, different but the same.This is a joint large print publication with the National Library for the Blind who brought out a simultaneous braille edition.

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"Connecting Medium links the past to the present, the Caribbean to England, mothers to fathers. Here are poems about identity and culture, generations and the future. A powerful sequence of poems about a black Medusa. Poems that link the material world to the spiritual one. Poems that recreate a sixties childhood in South London in vivid detail. Connecting Medium is full of energy and life. Hers is a bright, passionate voice."Jackie KayDorothea Smartt, born and raised in London, is of Barbadian heritage. Described as 'accessible and dynamic', her poetry appears in several journals and ground-breaking anthologies.

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A richly complex continuum of voices and characters inhabits these poems. An ecstatic hermit cultivates saints' body parts in a hothouse by the sea. A washerwoman invokes Oshún, orisha of love, while scrubbing laundry, and then a songbird magically appears. A fisher's acolyte son 'flies from island / to island, wreathing with rain-lilies / light houses, masts, and campanili'. An exiled Caliban meditates on the music of lifeless creatures as a source of power and aesthetic revelation. A communist Afro-Cuban dockworker rails against sugar as the black man's curse, while on a sugar plantation European Jewish immigrants and black cutters celebrate their common diasporic heritage. His verse rich in imagery and metaphor, the poet constructs a cosmic vision of the Caribbean that weaves African, European, and indigenous elements into a vibrant new synthesis, creating islands at once strange and familiar, haunting and sublime. Orlando Ricardo Menes writes poetry of baroque imagination and passionate energy."Cuban-American Orlando Ricardo Menes is not only a compelling poet, he's a storyteller, telling his stories in the first person or in a charged and compressed narrative. The poet touches all bases - magic realism, humor, irony, horror, mystery, mysticism - laced with references to tropical flora, fauna, history, and the melding of African and European religious mythologies."Phyllis and David Gershator, The Caribbean WriterOrlando Ricardo Menes was born in Peru to Cuban parents. He has lived most of his life in Florida, and considers himself a Cuban American. He currently teaches at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana.

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Kwame Dawes speaks for all those for whom reggae is a major part of life. He describes how reggae has been central to his sense of selfhood, his consciousness of place and society in Jamaica, his development as a writer - and why the singer Ken Boothe should be inseparably connected to his discovery of the erotic.Natural Mysticism is also a work of acute cultural analysis. Dawes argues that in the rise of roots reggae in the 1970s, Jamaica produced a form which was both wholly of the region and universal in its concerns. He contrasts this with the mainstream of Caribbean literature which, whilst anticolonial in sentiment was frequently conservative and colonial in form. Dawes finds in reggae's international appeal more than just an encouraging example. In the work of artists such as Don Drummond, Bob Marley, Winston Rodney and Lee 'Scratch' Perry, he finds a complex aesthetic whose inner structure points in a genuinely contemporary and postcolonial direction. He identifies this aesthetic as being both original and eclectic, as feeling free to borrow, but transforming what it takes in a subversive way. He sees it as embracing both the traditional and the postmodern, the former in the complex subordination of the lyric, melodic and rhythmic elements to the collective whole, and the latter in the dubmaster's deconstructive play with presences and absences. Above all, he shows that it is an aesthetic which unites body, emotions and intellect and brings into a single focus the political, the spiritual and the erotic.In constructing this reggae aesthetic, Kwame Dawes both creates a rationale for the development of his own writing and brings a new and original critical method to the discussion of the work of other contemporary Caribbean authors.Natural Mysticism has the rare merit of combining rigorous theoretical argument with a personal narrative which is often wickedly funny. Here is a paradigm shifting work of Caribbean cultural and literary criticism with the added bonus of conveying an infectious enthusiasm for reggae which will drive readers back to their own collections or even to go out and extend them!"Dawes is an ideal grammarian for the reggae aesthetic, his voice the estuary where his energies as a poet, professor and one-time musician are poured. He bears a gift, rarer than it should be in academia, for intellectually processing his subject and still yielding enlivening writing..."Michael Kuelker, The BeatKwame 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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Meet an enterprising alligator who sets up a ferry service, a water dog who escapes to freedom, two brave girls who find their way out of the Guyanese forest, a skeleton with a secret from the past, and Rima, the famous singing sea-bird. There is humour, mystery and excitement in these stories. In reading them children will discover the importance of fairness, mutual support, courage, opposition to injustice and commitment to freedom as essential personal and social values.Janet Jagan has served Guyana for over fifty years as a politician and as editor of the Mirror newspaper. She was the first woman President of Guyana.

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In Woman Song, Jean Goulbourne articulates the grief, hopes and unquenchable spirit of black women in the Caribbean. She writes with the directness of the reggae lyric, with both pungency and humour, and with an aphoristic economy which has the art of saying more with less. Her poems encompass the lives of women old and young; middle-class and sufferers; women whose lives are enclosed, who want liberation from the 'station of motherhood, wifehood and frustration', and women who through their resistance, creativity and assertion of selfhood have made space for themselves. The celebration of such lives stands as a beacon of hope in the depiction of Jamaican society in which rape, poverty and abandonment are too frequently women's lot.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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How does an alien with an unfortunate resemblance to Margaret Thatcher come to be in Uncle Obadiah's yard smoking all his best weed? This beautifully crafted and frequently hilarious collection of short stories is guaranteed to lift even the deepest gloom. Written in Jamaican patois and standard English, this is a brilliant read which will lead you through the yards of Jamaica to the streets of Miami. Here is a contemporary world, warts and all. Geoffrey Philp goes beyond stereotypes to portray the individuality and humanity in all his characters. And of course there is always the best lamb's breath colly to help improve the day."If Dickens were reincarnated as a Jamaican Rastaman, he would write stories as hilarious and humane as these. Uncle Obadiah and the other stories collected here announce Geoffrey Philp as a direct descendent of Bob Marley: poet, philosophizer, spokesperson for our next new world."Robert Antoni.Geoffrey Philp was born in Jamaica. He now lives and works in Miami.

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These Spanish-English poems focus on the island nature of Venezuela's Caribbean coast. Its rich observation of physical island-scapes is realised in imagery that strikes both with its freshness and rightness, and its speculative concern with the nature of islands in the Western imagination challenges us to new points of view.

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Colonial Countryside is a book of commissioned poems and short stories produced by ten global majority writers featuring National Trust houses with significant colonial histories. This includes properties whose owners engaged in the slavery business, in colonial administration or who were involved with the East India Company or British rule in India. Historians have accompanied these pieces with commentaries detailing the evidence upon which each creative commission was based. The book ends with a photo essay by the project’s commissioned photographer, Ingrid Pollard, the Turner Prize shortlisted artist who has pioneered critical interventions into the supposed whiteness of the British countryside. Peter Kalu’s story gives an account of Richard Watt of Speke Hall reflecting on his Jamaican experiences; Karen Onojaife’s story is set in Charlecote Park where a once-favoured Black page finds himself cut adrift; Jacqueline Crooks’ magical realist tale brings together an abused Indian princess and enslaved African employed in the mahogany trade; Ayanna Lloyd Banwo has written about Diego, the Spanish-speaking African who became Drake’s closest confidante; Masuda Snaith’s short story cycle tracks the cross-currents of empire across Lord Curzon’s Kedleston Hall; Maria Thomas’s account of Penrhyn Castle links past and present. It is a gothic tale of history biting back. Malachi’s story features a young Black man who dates a white girl with a taste for country house visiting, including Calke Abbey. Other contributions include poetic meditations on artefacts to be found in country houses. Hannah Lowe reflects on the taste for Chinoiserie, Seni Seneviratne gives voice to the enslaved children trapped within the frames of 18 th century art and Andre Bagoo makes connections between William Blathwayt of Dyrham Park and two stands featuring kneeling African men, brought to the house by his uncle in the seventeenth century.

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When the Trinidadian novelist, Harold Sonny Ladoo was found dead soon after the publication of his classic novel, No Pain Like This Body, for Christopher Laird, it became an obsession to try to discover the writer behind the work and what had brought about his untimely end. Equal to Mystery – words written by Ladoo – is the record of that pursuit.When, as the editor of a Trinidadian literary journal in the radical years of the early 1970s, Christopher Laird was sent Harold Sonny Ladoo’s novel, No Pain Like This Body (1973) to review, he knew he was looking at something revolutionary in Caribbean fiction. It is a novel that has recently been republished as a Penguin Modern Classic. But the next news Laird heard of Ladoo was that he had returned to Trinidad from Canada and had been found dead – very probably murdered – in the canefields outside his family’s village of McBean. Laird follows in the path of Ladoo to Canada, where he went to make a name for himself as a writer, and tracks him as a student and young married man through conversations with his widow and other family members. He looks in detail at his relationships with two Canadian writers, Dennis Lee and Peter Such, who supported his work, and in Lee’s case published him. Here there is an acute account of their meetings across the line of race, of the mix of generous contact and elusive flight in their relationship. Above all, with access to Ladoo’s unpublished material -- short stories and fragments of the vast body of fiction he announced he was writing -- Laird offers acute analysis of what is there, honest bafflement about just what Ladoo was up to, with a tragic sense of the talent that was lost through his untimely death.

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Patterflash embraces the performative, self-ironising aesthetic of campness but, as a mask, it is a complex and very malleable one, capable of showing features of tenderness, bravery, righteous anger and sometimes sadness and alarm – as well as the comedic. Within a collection that displays an engaging variety of language registers, both ‘high’ and ‘low’ in tone, the masking sometimes makes use of Polari, the gay street language that simultaneously reveals and conceals, excludes and invites, estranges and makes familiar. The collection connects the poet as a wry, humane observer of the scene, particularly as conducted in Manchester, and the persona of “Adam Lowe” as both actor in and narrator of his own dramas, who performs, exults and sometimes suffers in a wide range of guises and disguises. What unites them is the urge to embrace the possibilities of being exactly who you want to be whatever the complications or consequences of your choice. From the four-year-old boy who, though always easy in his mixedness of race, also wants to wear a blonde woman’s wig without any angst of self-contradiction, through the poems delighting in the frank physicality of gay sex, to the mature man experiencing domestic contentment, Adam Lowe takes us on a journey rich in observation and always in a poetry that makes an art of patterflash.

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Ian McDonald’s Collected Poems (2018) was marked by a late flush of exceptional new poems that addressed both the infirmities of ageing as well as its continuing joys. That flow of memory has continued, addressing a long, rich life from a childhood in Antigua, youth in Trinidad and an adult life lived in Guyana. It was not to be halted by anything as malleable as the word “collected”, and this collection of poems from the past four years is more than just a “brawta” to bring back from the market to enjoy. There is the mystery of why certain memories, dormant for decades, suddenly emerge, like a childhood nightmare still as real 80 years later, or how in one’s own elder years, recollections of one’s parents take on a pertinence and vividness of presence. But it is not merely the past that revisits but an immersion in the present that has never been more real and precious in every respect. If the world has become, increasingly, one’s house and garden, its inhabitants one’s wife, children and grandchildren, it is experienced as not a jot less rich than anything in the past –indeed ever more precious for its evanescence. Ian McDonald writes that he is simply the recipient, the receiving station of what arrives in his head. He denigrates his gift for exactness, for the telling detail, for the right word, gifts that have been cultivated by a long life of writing.

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Bath of Herbs is her beautifully crafted, honest and thoughtful first collection which explores the complexity of mixed-race, hybrid identities and relationships to the English and Welsh mountains, fells, rivers and shorelines from an ‘othered’, unmappable, positionality. It honours the lives of Black and Brown women and asks how they can reclaim space, both practically and conceptually. It celebrates and mourns the unspoken pain and joys of motherhood; of menstrual cycles, childbirth, tending to sick children with life-threatening illnesses, the death of mothers, love in all its myriad forms and the desire to escape the constraints of domestic and family life towards different kinds of freedoms. It also revisits the confusing world of childhood; the inexplicable actions of adults and the bullies who despise perceived difference. There is her ownership of a writerly inheritance handed down from her grandfather, the Black Martiniquan writer, Joseph Zobel, but also an awareness that this heritage has involved a movement away from the Black peasant world Zobel wrote about towards a comfortable Europeanness of being. Other poems address the security of a middle-class life and the many pleasures it offers – but also how that world can be broken apart by death, by serious illness, by the fear that the channels of communication in a marriage have ‘gone down’ and how, as a woman expected to hold everything together, one is sometimes forced to take refuge in the wildest fantasies. Linking the whole is an engagement with the possibilities of healing: as in the bath of herbs in which her grandmother bathed her mother after giving birth; in the physicality of running and purificatory swimming in a river; in the care a hospital gives to her child and in the healing power of the natural world.

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Barbara Jenkins writes about the experiences of a personal and family-centred life in Trinidad with great psychological acuteness, expanding on the personal with a deep awareness of the economic, social and cultural contexts of that experience. She writes about a childhood and youth located in the colonial era and an adult life that began at the very point of Trinidad’s independent nationhood, a life begun in poverty in a colonial city going through rapid change. It is about a life that expanded in possibility through an access to an education not usually available to girls from such an economic background. This schooling gave the young Barbara Jenkins the intense experience of being an outsider to Trinidad’s hierarchies of race and class. She writes about a life that has gender conflict at its heart, a household where her mother was subject to beatings and misogynist control, but also about strong matriarchal women. As for so many Caribbean people, opportunity appeared to exist only via migration, in her case to Wales in the 1960s. But there was a catch in the arrangement that the years in Wales had put to the back of her mind: the legally enforceable promise to the Trinidadian government that in return for their scholarship, she had to return. She did, and has lived the rest of her life to date in Trinidad, an experience that gives her writing an insider/outsider sharpness of perception.'From her childhood in colonial Port of Spain, to becoming a migrant student and young mother in Wales and then returning to Trinidad post-Independence, Jenkins tells her own life story with the emotional sensitivity of a natural storyteller, the insight of a philosopher, the scope of a historian and the good humour of a Trini. This beautifully written and moving memoir will feel achingly familiar to anyone who knows what it is like to navigate race, class and girlhood while growing up in the West Indies, anyone who has ever felt like an outsider.’ Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, author of When We Were Birds.

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This is the story of one woman's life; that of Gwyneth Cuffie, a seemingly ordinary woman: teacher, lover of children and music, and pillar of her community. Beautifully written and deeply compassionate, the novel follows Gwynneth's life, as she charts her own path through the turbulent times of her island and struggle against colonialism.

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In 1938, Arthur Calder-Marshall, a young British novelist and communist visited Trinidad, just a year after the ‘Butler Riots’ had rocked the oil-belt in the south of the island and demonstrated that the British colonial hold over the island could not be sustained for long. Calder-Marshall’s account of his stay, first published in 1939, is insightful, unsparing in its exposure of appalling social conditions, and sometimes just humanly entertaining in its satirical description of, for instance, the hypocrisy of those of the middle-class who thought of themselves as radicals but would not perform in a play with actors who were too black. It is highly readable, with a novelist’s eye for characters and situations, adding to the slim body of writing about 1930’s Trinidad by C.L.R. James, A.H. Mendes and Ralph de Boissiere. It documents just how stifling was the hand of Crown Colony government in reinforcing white privilege in Trinidad, and it shows the huge gulf between the Trinidad being promoted as a destination for tourists, and the abysmal quality of housing and health-care that inflicted premature death on the urban poor. If Calder-Marshall does not have enough to say about the lives of rural Indo-Trinidadians, he is acute on the growth of race and revolutionary political consciousness amongst the most advanced sections of the Afro-Trinidadian working class. One valuable chapter records his interview with the then trade union leader, Adrian Cola Rienzi, on the global nature of radical anti-colonialism, connecting Rienzi’s work with Sinn Fein in Ireland and the workers’ struggle in Trinidad. Calder-Marshall’s was a sadly rare voice amongst the white British left as a critic of empire, in comparison to the covertly racist paternalism of the mainstream of the Labour Party.

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Comrade Sak charts Shapurji Saklatvala's movement from privileged Parsi beginnings as a member of the mega rich Tata dynasty to revolutionary communist. It examines his quarrel with Gandhi over the goals and tactics of the Indian independence movement and Saklatvala's not always easy relationship to the Communist International. Above all, the study documents his role in a radical phase of British Labour politics and the traditions of local activism and municipal socialism, which made his Battersea North constituency such a welcoming home.Drawn from his speeches and writings, Saklatvala's passionate and radical voice speaks clearly to our times when the mainstream left is in retreat. His words and life serve to remind us that the goals of ending inequality and making possible human liberation are too important to be consigned to forgotten history. This comprehensively revised 2020 edition replaces the 1998 publication.What Marc Wadsworth brings to the study are the insights of an active participant in the contemporary struggles to define a “political Black” position within the British Left. In exploring how Saklatvala negotiated the roles of Indian anti-imperialist, Indian British MP and Communist, Wadsworth has written an important study of African, Caribbean and Asian working class history in the 1920s and 1930s.Marc Wadsworth has worked as a senior news reporter at Thames Television, Chair of the NUJ's Black Members' Council and National Secretary of the Anti-Racist Alliance. He currently works as a freelance journalist and broadcaster.

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A 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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This book, based on a conference organised by The Friends of Mr Biswas, explores the writing careers of Seepersad Naipaul and his two sons, Vidia and Shiva, within the sustenance and sometimes pain of family connections -- synergies that V.S. Naipaul laboured to conceal, as the publishing histories of his father’s collection of short stories and Letters between a Father and Son both show. Essays by Brinsley Samaroo and Aaron Eastley focus on Seepersad Naipaul’s importance as a journalist who opened up what was hidden in Trinidadian society, who boldly creolised reporting styles and offered his sons an example of the possibilities of combining fiction and non-fiction. Arnold Rampersad, in his moving essay on his journalist father, Jerome, further makes the case for seeing a tradition of Trinidadian newspaper writing that achieves literary quality. Not only is the father given long-overdue attention, but so too is the work of Shiva Naipaul, exploring the same family territory in his deservedly classic novel, Fireflies.Essays find new things to say about V.S. Naipaul: Andre Bagoo writes on his fascination with gay sexuality and cinema (another essay deals with the themes of sadomasochism and incest), Hywel Dix advances the idea of “lateness”, in an insightful reading of Magic Seeds, whilst other essays focus on issues of race, gender and globalisation in the Naipauls’ work. Kevin Frank, for instance, explores the contrast between the father’s engagement with Creole society, and his sons’ recoil, and Elizabeth Jackson and Paula Morgan write respectively on masculinity and motherhood in the Naipauls’ work.Seepersad and Sons is highly readable because contributors to this book have followed the example and urging of the keynote speaker, Professor Kenneth Ramchand, to address readers beyond an academic circle, and convey the importance of the Naipauls and their literary heritage to the wider society. Literary contributions from Sharon Millar, Raymond Ramcharitar and Keith Jardim make connections with the Naipaulian legacy that show just how alive it is. Robert Clarke provides a visual dimension to the book in a photo essay on the St James district of Port of Spain and J. Vijay Maharaj writes on the complementary art of Shastri Maharaj.Contributors include: Kenneth Ramchand, Vijay Maharaj, Bhoendradatt Tewarie, Nicholas Laughlin, Aaron Eastley, Brinsley Samaroo, Arnold Rampersad, Robert Clarke, Andre Bagoo, Sharon Millar, Keith Jardim, Raymond Ramcharitar, Kevin Frank, Jim Hanna, Hywel Dix, Elizabeth Jackson, Paula Morgan, Fariza Mohammed, Meghan Cleghorn, Varistha Persad and Nivedita Misra.

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Breanne Mc Ivor is a bold new voice in Caribbean fiction. The Trinidad of her stories is utterly contemporary but also a place defined by its folk mythologies and its cultural creations, its traditions of masking and disguises. Her stories confront the increasing economic and cultural divisions between rich and poor, the alarming rise in crime, murders and an alternative economy based on drug trafficking. Their daring is that they look both within the human psyche and back in time to make sense of this reality. The figure of the loup-garou, the violent rhetoric of the Midnight Robber – or even cannibalism lurking far off the beaten track – have become almost comic tropes of a dusty folklore. In Mc Ivor’s stories they become real and terrifying daylight presences, monsters who pass among us. Her great gift as a writer is to take us to unexpected places, both to seduce us into a kind of sympathy for her monsters of greater and lesser kinds, and sometimes to reveal a capacity for redemption amongst characters we are tempted to dismiss as shallow, unlikable human beings. The problem, in a world of masks and disguises, is how to tell the difference.In these carefully crafted stories, with room for humour, though of a distinctly gothic kind, Breanne Mc Ivor reaches deep into the roots of Trinidad folk narratives to present us with very modern versions of our troubled selves.

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Come Back to Me My Language remains the authoritative study of the remarkable flourishing of West Indian poetry which emerged in the latter half of the 20th century. Writing with clarity and vigour, J. Edward Chamberlin discusses the work of more than thirty poets and writes with insight on poems by John Agard, Edward Baugh, Louise Bennett, Bongo Jerry, Dionne Brand, Kamau Brathwaite, Aimé Césaire, Merle Collins, Fred D’Aguiar, Lorna Goodison, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Claude McKay, Anthony McNeill, Mervyn Morris, Mutabaruka, Grace Nichols, Victor Questel, Eric Roach, Dennis Scott, Olive Senior, Philip Sherlock, Michael (Mikey) Smith, Bruce St. John, and Derek Walcott.

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When Speak from Here to There was published in 2016 it was, remarkably, doing something quite new. There are of course the conversations implied in the poems of Coleridge and Wordsworth, but no two poets had committed to, in the words of Will Harris, the almost daily “structure of call-and-response, each utterance is filtered through the other”. A New Beginning offers, as Karen McCarthy Wolf noted in her review of Speak from Here, the same “warmth and a reassurance … in the correspondence itself, between a black man almost but not quite marooned in the white of America’s Midwest, and a white man negotiating his own exile from the vast physical and historical dissonance of Western Australia”, but there is much that carries that initial dialogue to new depths of trust, self-exposure and intimacy, to the expression of new themes, concerns and investigations of poetic form. This richly multi-layered dialogue arises from responses to each poet’s public world, to the private worlds of family, to the inner world of wondering how one can write “love poems in a time of war, these times of monstrous beasts”, and from the stimulus of the other’s poem arriving in the e-mail in-tray. This is the age of Trump, the monster “Lurking in the shadows”, of the seemingly unstoppable degradation of the Australian environment, of, in John Kinsella’s words, a time when there is no “exoneration or relief” in poetry “but witness and recounting”. Above all, though both poets express their anxieties about the limitations of the prophetic (“the pain of hope, and the terror of faithlessness”), there is the countervailing witness of their immensely fertile imaginative response to each other’s words and the comfort that “On the road, you long for the like-minded” is a longing that is being fulfilled. What is also clear is that for both poets there is also a generous space for the third party to the exchange – the reader.

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Listen carefully: a world within a world echoes in these short stories from Christine Barrow. Here, the unmuffled pulse of Barbados beats. Barrow brings us scenes of family squabbles, bitterly unhappy housewives, superstitious salt-of-the-earth grandmothers, disillusioned scholars burning with subterranean desire, alongside young men brined and buttressed by the sea. Each story skillfully unmasks the lie of an ordinary life, or an ordinary island: these characters wrestle with the ghosts of the Panama Canal; they grow up motherless and rudderless, reaching across the Atlantic towards England, their navel strings planted deep in St. Lucy and Bridgetown.Barrow artfully arrests miniature details -- a too-sharp crochet hook; a glinting pearl pendant; sea glass that sparkles in sunlight -- and from these fragments and slivers, she assembles potent realities. Her prose confronts the weight of plantocracy and its embedded privilege, in stories that show how Barbadian history seeps into the rum, rebellion and rhythm of contemporary life.

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This guide is written from the conviction that Prophets is a major work of Caribbean poetry, and that whilst it can be read with enjoyment without the aid of a book of this kind, it is a work so rich in local reference and allusion that a little help can enhance the reader's understanding and pleasure. The introduction discusses Prophets in its social and political setting of 1980s Jamaica and the significance of the poem's social geography. It discusses Prophets' relationship to the key texts that influenced it, or against which it was written, including Derek Walcott's Omeros, Sylvia Wynter's The Hills of Hebron and the early novels of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. The second section of summaries and annotations provides a line by line guide to the poem. This includes notes to its very specific references to the social and cultural manifestations of 1980s Jamaica, identification of places identified in the poem, and notes to the poems' many allusions: to the Bible, but also to other works of literature and to the reggae lyrics that form a bridge between the Bible, the prophetic and Jamaican popular culture.

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This is a moving story of a family’s beginnings, growth and, in the context both of time and Trinidadian society, its inevitable dispersal. Savi Naipaul Akal’s memoir pays tribute to remarkable parents, so different but equal in importance to their large family. Her father’s life is one of heroic self-invention, from virtual orphan in a dirt-poor rural Indian family, one generation away from indentured migration, who through self-education became Seepersad Naipaul, a remarkable journalist and pioneering documenter of Indian Trinidadian life. Her mother, Dropatie, displayed remarkable diplomatic skills in sustaining a relationship with the large and inward-looking Capildeo clan of which she was the seventh daughter, whilst loyally supporting her husband’s insistence on independence and engagement with Trinidadian life. It was Dropatie, after Seepersad’s tragically early death, who held the family together, so that all seven children achieved university education. It is an account of family loyalty, sacrifice, and sometimes tensions; pride in the writing achievements of her brothers Vidiadhar and Shiva, and sorrow over estrangements and Shiva’s premature death. Through this focus, the memoir also gives a sharply observed picture of cultural change in Trinidad from colony to independent nation, of being Indian in a Creole society, of the role of education, and her parents’ encouragement of herself and her sisters to make independent lives for themselves. The memoir gives an acute analysis of the pressures that led many of the family to emigrate, but also of the good lives made by Savi and her husband that led them to “put down their bucket” and stay.Above all, this memoir offers the pleasure of writing which is elegant and lucid, with a distinctively personal voice. The book is further enhanced by the generous quantity of family photographs that say so much about both people and the times they lived through.

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Completed with the enthusiastic support and participation of the late Laureate, Jean Antoine-Dunne’s lively and enriching study begins in a recognition of how important film has been in the whole of Derek Walcott’s career. It is not merely that Derek Walcott wrote a number independent film scripts such as The Rig, The Haitian Earth and To Die for Grenada and wrote film treatments of several of his plays such as for Marie Laveau, Ti Jean and O Babylon, and also a film treatment of his poetic epic Omeros, but that the whole of Walcott’s work, whether poetry, drama or painting, is infused with the sense of the filmic. As she says, “I see him as a film poet”.This study, written with unrivalled access both to Walcott and to his multiple library archives, moves in several directions. Firstly, it comprises a record of all Walcott’s work in film, extensively illustrated with his storyboards and quotation from this mostly unpublished work. Secondly, it tracks Walcott’s own commentary on the place of film in his aesthetics and on his ideas about reaching the widest possible audiences. Thirdly it tracks those explicit moments in the texture of his work (Omeros is a key focus in this regard) where Walcott references film and the filmic. Fourthly the study proposes ways of rereading Walcott’s work – its narrative modes, imagery and construction -- through the lense of the filmic and in particular through the work of Sergei Eisenstein and his conception of film montage. Finally, the book makes an important contribution to the underdeveloped area of reception in Caribbean literary and aesthetic studies, exploring the concept of hybrid forms and their capacity to reach audiences excluded by the exclusively literary. Here, in an immensely stimulating argument, she brings together both the theoretical work of Gilles Deleuze and Caribbean discussions of the role of oral and visual traditions in Caribbean culture.

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In Pitch Lake, Andre Bagoo, author of the Bocas prize shortlisted poetry collection, Burn, displays a continuing commitment to exploration and experiment.Andre Bagoo has been awarded The Charlotte and Isidor Paiewonsky Prize for first-time publication in The Caribbean Writer for 'On Wordsworth's The Daffodils', a poem from Pitch Lake. You can download the poem below.Divided into three sections , Andre Bagoo’s poems explore the multiple resonances of the words, where pitch signifies both the stickiness of memory – the way the La Brea Pitch Lake is a place where “buried trees [are] born again” – and the idea of scattering: of places and impressions and the effort to hold them in one vision. The first part brings together poems that encompass reflections on art; Trinidad as a fallen Eden with its history of slavery and the inhumanity of “cachots brulants”; Black Lives Matter; visits to Britain and the image of cows “straight out of Hardy”; and poems about finding love in a climate of homophobia. Poems with an elaborated discursive structure sit next to little imagist poems written in response to Trinidad’s disappearing fauna and threatened eco-system."Lake", is a sequence of prose poems, varying in length, some surreal, suggestive rather than explicit, presenting subtly dislocated narratives that, even in a short space, disrupt the reader’s expectations of where they are heading. In their brevity, these prose pieces offer surfaces, like that of a lake, that invite the reader to wonder what lies underneath but warn that this is not necessarily what is most predictable. In Pitch Lake, Andre Bagoo, author of the Bocas prize shortlisted poetry collection, Burn, displays a continuing commitment to exploration and experiment.

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As a child, Nick Mahoka fled Idi Amin's Uganda, and the poems in this collection relate to the horrors of the civil war that ousted the brutal tyranny of Amin. In political terms the poems chart the impact of imperialism and neo-colonialism that lay behind those traumas in the life of the nation. In personal terms, the poems are framed between the contrary pulls of attachment and flight, exile and longing. At their heart is an unwavering curiosity about how people behave in extreme situations, and what this reveals about our common human capacities to indulge grandiose visions, betray them, dissemble, seek revenge and kill. There is no presumption of innocence. There may be flight, but there is no standing aside. The narrator can dream (but is it a dream?) of a “dead man/who has been stung by the invisible bee of my bullet”.There is much darkness of reference in the collection, but also a hopeful search for truthfulness and trust as the only things that matter. The poems - as poems of grace, control and beauty of image – demonstrate the power of the best poetry to speak of difficult things in a way that enlightens, not merely horrifies. The care in the making and shaping of the poems bears witness to the evident fact that for Nick Makoha poetry became “This rock […] a sanctuary from which I can repair the ruins”.

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Monica Minott’s host of witnesses are women who are collectively grounded in ritual and spiritual understanding, practical, sensible – though, like all of us, flawed in their humanity.

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Head in the air, feet on the ground, gardens, household objects, frogs, dogs, birds, kites and a host of other flora, fauna, rocks and stones find their place in the fertile mind of a poet, painter, sculptor and musician who has lived long enough to accumulate wisdom.Sometimes the messages offer perceptions that have never been seen so clearly before, sometimes they hint at the elusive just out of reach or sight. Always, though “possibilities beckon”, and the little poems, haiku of an individual, invented kind, frequently offer metaphysical graspings both in the philosophical sense and in the way the metaphysical poets yoked the seemingly disparate into perfect sense. There is an acute awareness of plays of light and shade, textures, the touchable and the surrounding world of sound. As in Greaves’ paintings, shifts in perspective and proportion offer upheavals of the habitual view. The gaze looks inward as much as out – at the processes of thought, memory and imagination. The pleasures are both singular and collective: in the polished economy of phrase, form and the moments of surprise, and in the accumulating sense of entering a world that it is a privilege to share. Not least of the pleasures are the eight pieces of original artwork: ink, brush and pen drawings and collages that offer an alternative vision to the poems.

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For Joan Wong, growing up in a Chinese family in the political turmoil of 1960s Guyana, family history is never straightforward. There are the examples of her grandmothers – Clarice Chung, iron-willed matriarch who has ensured the family's survival through unremitting toil, with her pride in maintaining racial and cultural identity, and Susan Leo, whose failures have shamed the family, who found comfort from harsh poverty in relationships with two Indian men and adopting an Indian life-style. Later, when Joan Wong makes her own pilgrimage to ancestral China at the turn of the twenty-first century, there are surprises in store.Jan Lowe Shinebourne is a Guyanese novelist who has published a collection of short stories and three novels; Timepiece (1986), The Last English Plantation and Chinese Women (2004). In addition to being an author, Shinebourne also worked in London as an editor for several journals, as a political and cultural activist and as a college and university lecturer. She now lives in Sussex.

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ProvidentialLonglisted for 2016 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature! Channer’s debut poetry collection achieves an intimate and lyric meditation on family, policing, loss, and violence, but the work is enlivened by humour, tenderness, and the rich possibilities that come from honest reflection.Channer’s debut poetry collection achieves an intimate and lyric meditation on family, policing, loss, and violence, but the work is enlivened by humour, tenderness, and the rich possibilities that come from honest reflection. Combined with a capacity to offer physical landscapes with painterly sensitivity and care, a graceful mining of the nuances of Jamaican patwa and American English, and a judicious use of metaphor and similie, Providential is a work of “heartical” insight and vulnerability No one, since Claude McKay’s folksy Constab Ballads of 1912, has attempted to tackle the unlikely literary figure of the Jamaican policeman. Now, over a century later, drawing on his own family knowledge of the world of the police, on the complex dynamic of his relationship with his father, and framed within the humane principles of Rasta and reggae, Channer has both explored the colonial origins of that police culture and brought us up to date in necessary ways. Here are poems that manage to turn the complex relationships between a man and his father, a man and his mother, and man and his country and a man and his children, into something akin to grace. Providential does not read like a novelist’s one-off flirtation with poetry, but an accomplished overture to what ought to be a remarkable literary journey for a writer of immense talent and versatility.

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Another 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.

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Vladimir Lucien is a young poet with so many gifts. His poetry is intelligent, musical, gritty in observation, graceful in method. You can see a young man building his house of poetry, just as his poems reflect on building a marriage and making his home, and all the accommodations that this demands. The world where he builds his house is St Lucia, itself an island that reflects the intra-regional migrancy of Caribbean people, with ancestral connections to Barbados, Antigua and Trinidad. He builds his house with stories of ancestors, immediate family, the history embedded in his language choices as a St Lucian writer, and heroes such as Walter Rodney, CLR James, Kamau Brathwaite and a local steelbandsman. His poems are never overtly political, but there's an oblique and often witty politics embedded in the poems, as where observing the rise of a grandfather out of rural poverty into the style of colonial respectability, he writes of the man "who eat his farine and fish/and avocado in a civilize fight between/knife and fork and etiquette on his plate". His poems tell truths, creating and questioning their own mythologies, as in a poem about his mother who "liked to look for relatives/ to find blood where there was only water." This is a collection that is alive with its conscious tensions both in subject matter and form. There's a tension between the vision of ancestors, family and of the poet himself as being engaged in the business of acting in the world and building on the past, and a sharp awareness of the inescapability of age's frailty, the decay of memory and of death. In the music of the poems themselves, there's an enlivening counterpoint between the natural rhythms of creole speech and the metric organisation of the line and its patterns of sound.

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'Waywardness' by Ezekel Alan (Jamaica) 'Reversal of Fortunes' by Kevin Baldeosingh (Trinidad & Tobago) 'Father, Father' by Garfield Ellis (Jamaica) 'And the Virgin's Name was Leah' by Heather Barker 'Amelia at Devil's Bridge' by Joanne Hillhouse (Antigua & Barbuda) 'The Monkey Trap' by Kevin Hosein (Trinidad & Tobago) 'A Good Friday' by Barbara Jenkins (Trinidad & Tobago) 'This Thing We Call Love' by Ivory Kelly (Belize) 'All the Secret Things No One Ever Knows' by Sharon Leach (Jamaica) 'Mango Summer' by Janice Lynn Mather (Bahamas) 'The Whale House' by Sharon Millar (Trinidad & Tobago) 'Berry' by Kimmisha Thomas (Jamaica)

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Sharon Leach's Love It When You Come, Hate It When You Go occupies new territory in Caribbean writing. The characters of her stories are neither the folk of the old rural world, the sufferers of the urban ghetto familiar from reggae, or the old prosperous brown and white middle class of the hills rising above the city, but the black urban salariat of the unstable lands in between, of the new housing developments. These are people struggling for their place in the world, eager for entry into the middle class but always anxious that their hold on security is precarious. These are people wondering who they are - Jamaicans, of course, but part of a global cultural world dominated by American material and celebrity culture. Her characters - male and female - want love, self-respect and sometimes excitement, but the choices they make quite often offer them the opposite. They pay lip service to the pieties of family life, but the families in these stories are no less spaces of risk, vulnerability, abuse and self-serving interests. Sharon Leach's virtue as a writer is that she brings a cool, unsentimental eye to the follies, misjudgements and self-deceptions of her characters without ever losing sight of their humanity or losing interest in their individual natures. The beauty of her writing is its ability to marry the underlying muscular deftness of her prose with the voices of her narrating characters and the variety of registers they speak. She writes about the pursuit of sex, its joys, disappointments and degradations with a frankness little matched in existing Caribbean writing.

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Roger Robinson recently came to the attention of UK audiences in the Bloodaxe anthology Ten, hailed by Carol Ann Duffy as "a joyful and important moment in publishing".The Butterfly Hotel is his first full collection of poetry, a telling document of the immigrant experience, from the 1980s to the present day, and the realities of uprooted culture. Butterflies hold a symbolic importance throughout, fragile yet ideal, adapting to survive.Roger Robinson is a writer and performer who lives in London. His one-man shows are The Shadow Boxer, Letter from My Father's Brother and Prohibition, all of which premiered at the British Festival of Visual Theatre at Battersea Arts Centre. He has received writing commissions from Stratford Theatre Royal East, the National Trust, the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate. His poetry has appeared in the Flipped Eye pamphlets Suitcase (2005; ISBN 9780954224776) and Suckle (2009; ISBN 9781905233212), the latter winning the Peoples Book Prize, and in the Bloodaxe anthology Ten, edited by Bernardine Evaristo and Daljit Nagra (2010; ISBN 9781852248796).

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