Search results for ""Peepal Tree Press Ltd""

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

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

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Geoffrey Philp's poems of exasperation and longing explore a reluctance to leave Jamaica and the 'marl-white roads at Struie' and anger that 'blackman still can't live in him own/black land' where 'gunman crawl like bedbug'. But whilst poems explore the keeness and sorrows of an exile's memory, the new landscape of South Florida landscape fully engages the poet's imagination. The experience of journeying is seen as part of a larger pattern of restless but creative movement in the Americas. Philp joins other Caribbean poets in making use of nation language, but few have pushed the collision between roots language and classical forms to greater effect."Philp weaves dialect and landscape into his lines with subtle authority. It is easy to get caught up in the content and miss the grace of his technique."Carrol Fleming, The Caribbean Writer.Geoffrey Philp was born in Jamaica. He now lives and works in Miami.

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The Long Gap is a passionate exploration of the Caribbean exile's need 'to go back/to clutch the roots of the word'. Writing out of the 'complex singularity of twin horizons', and the fear of the 'gap' which can grow too long, Kellman engages with his Barbadian heritage as one which both sustains and drives to anger. In language which echoes the rhythms of the 'tuk' band and the 'scat of the guitar strum', Kellman both celebrates the traditions of resistance and creative invention in the region and excoriates the islands of cocaine, political corruption and continuing subservience to external masters."Tony Kellman is always trying something different... He is a serious poet and the various contradictions and affiliations found in his verse embody those of the Caribbean and, to generalise, most poetry. A formalist attracted towards, oral, folk and popular traditions, he also mixes the highly lyrical with dialect and the prose-like. I especially like his metaphors and patterns of sound. When reading these poems you feel that... here is one of our best younger poets."Bruce King.Anthony Kellman was born in Barbados. He currently teaches at Augusta College, Georgia.

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In a vision which constantly sees the 'doubleness' of people, places and things, Earl McKenzie both confronts such experiences as the discovery that the very same 'farmers / who sing on choirs' are those who became a lynch mob and beat a passing stranger to death, and celebrates the rich variousness of a landscape and a people who 'fear the straight line / for it is as rigid as death'. McKenzie's poems speak directly and without pretension, but in their often quirky observations and ability to find resonant images from the everyday, they are arresting and memorable."The particular images from nature that inform his work, along with his keen insight into human hearts, make Against Linearity a book to cherish." The Caribbean WriterEarl McKenzie was born and lives in Jamaica. In addition to Against Linearity he is the author of A Boy Named Ossie and Two Roads to Mount Joyful & Other Stories.

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Professor Parekh acknowledges that many in the West, feeling threatened by the rise of fundamentalist movements, dismiss them as irrational and atavistic. He insists, though, that we analyse them rationally and brings rigour and clarity to the discussion of the concept of religious fundamentalism and cautions against the unrestricted use of this concept to describe a wide range of contemporary religious phenomena. He argues that lumping fundamentalism together with religious conservatism, revivalism and ultra-orthdoxy fails to distinguish its particular modern character.Bhikhu Parekh was educated at the Universities of Bombay and London. He is a member of the UK House of Lords and was chair of the Runnymede Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain.

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R. Raj Rao brings into play all the senses in focusing on an India which makes no concessions to the travel agent's romance or the aid agencies' image of defeated despair. "Images of India, convincingly realistic, proliferate in these poems. We confront a variety of attitudes and values, which add up to a distinct personality and voice. There is no compromise with romantic urges. The inner search and its poetic expression are appropriately related; rough, sharp, ironic sometimes, and always serious."Nissim Ezekiel"This is finely crafted poetry which yet astonishes with its fierce scatological energy."David DabydeenRaj Rao teaches at the University of Poona. He is also a playwright, short story writer and critic.

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Cosmic Dance won the 1994 Guyana Prize for Literature.Dr. Vayu Sampat is brought two stories: of the rape of a young girl by a powerful state official, and of a seemingly altruistic gift of blood. The first is an all too common event, the second all too rare in a society where the strong feed off the weak, and everything has its price. What challenges him is that both stories cross the lines of race in a society divided between Indians and Africans.Involvement in these events, against his will, is the catalyst which forces Vayu from a path of comfortable routine into the chaos of uncontrollable circumstance in which all his assumptions are challenged. When the cataclysm comes, Vayu barely escapes with his life, but he at least has a future to confront.Cosmic Dance, set in the authoritarian, post-colonial Caribbean state of Aritya (Guyana in disguise), is a fast-moving, tense and bloody political thriller whose characters draw the reader into the events from page one. It deals acutely with issues of race and gender and the interplay between intention and chance in human affairs.No novel penetrates more deeply the political corruption at the heart of 1980s Guyana, but no Indo-Caribbean novel deals more honestly with the nature and sources of Indian racist feelings towards African-Caribbeans. Whether at the superficial level of 'people like us/people not like us' or at a deeper level of poisonous caste-based antipathies, Khemraj's novel looks at how the rightful search for justice in a climate of interethnic hostility can be undermined from within. The novel also has its subtext an inquiry into the meaningfulness of a Hindu worldview as a way of making sense of the catastrophes the characters experience.Harischandra Khemraj worked as a teacher in Guyana. He won the 1994 Guyana Prize for Literature. He currently lives in the USA.

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"Is tattle I tattling / sooring I sooring / call an' refrain / serious like bleeding cane." Whether 'klasekal' or 'kweyol', these poems deliver the subtlest of hits and the most serious of points behind the camouflage of play. The scenes range from Brixton to Guyana; the tone traverses the tender, the celebratory, the ironic and the outraged. If A Season of Sometimes is short on conventional English verse forms, it has its own strong sense of structure within which to capture the rhythmic and verbal inventiveness of the Caribbean voice without taming it. As he writes: "If ah shop pon corna / na gie a wee trus', / wha mex say / dem a go tak / iambic pentameter"."... both intellectual and emotional considerations are splendidly served... his collection of poems resonates with wisdom and wit..." Andrew Salkey, World Literature TodayMarc Matthews is Guyanese. He now lives in Britain. He is an actor, was half of Dem Two. His first collection of poems, Guyana My Altar, won the 1987 Guyana Prize.

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When Babatunde and his friends gather in Mama T's famous peppersoup joint, they tell gist, jokes and stories to make sense of a world gone mad. These stories, as pungent and peppery as Mama T's soup, satirise the 'oppressocracy' of contemporary Nigeria in a bubbling mixture of pidgin and standard English, using forms as diverse as science fiction and the folk-tale. Corruption, overweening power and privilege, military copus and food shortages - these lunatic times are enough to drive a suffering people to despair, but Okunlola's characters refuse to see themselves as victims and the stories celebrate their ingenuity and resistance. So when a drunken Babatunde, an idiosyncratic speller at the best of times, is roped in to carve an inscription on a monument to be unveiled by a visiting world bank delegation, he somehow manages to get in the last word..."... these satirical pieces vividly bring to life conditions in contemporary Nigeria."Trinidad Sunday GuardianAdeyo (Dayo) Okunlola was born in Nigeria in 1956. In the early 1990s he came to London where he has subsequently worked as a teacher of science in secondary schools.

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Torn between despair over 'the rancid taste of life on the island' and attachment to the 'irresistible, green island days', the characters in these short stories inhabit a Caribbean they find it impossible to live in, yet impossible to live without. They dream of being inviolable and whole, but live in situations which are frequently on the edge of disorder and personal threat. Yet there is nothing wearily pessimistic about the tone of this collection. Williams's stories, like his characters, are intensely alive. Their individual voices button-hole us and won't let us go. Their tales are sad, but what passion they have in their pursuit of meaning!"In Williams' brilliant final story... the urge to find release and return is given mystical and memorable expression..." LiberationN.D. Williams is Guyanese and lives in New York. In 1976 his novel Ikael Torass won the prestigious Casa de las Americas prize.

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This fictionalised autobiography gives a richly woven portrait of Kamla's life from early childhood to the point where she leaves her family, Pasea village and Trinidad to attend university in the UK. It gives a vivid and inward picture of a Caribbean community still in touch with its roots, seen from the developing perspective of a young woman at the crossroads of diverse social, cultural and religious influences. The portrait bears witness to the moral strengths of the community as well as showing Kamla's growing awareness of the repressions and hypocrisies of its treatment of women. From early in her life Kamla is surprised by a contrary inner voice which frequently gainsays the wisdom of her elders and betters. But Kamla is growing up in a traditional Hindu community and attending schools in colonial Trinidad where rote learning is still the order of the day. She learns that this voice creates nothing but trouble and silences it. In this book the voice is freed.Set in the 1940s, Butterfly in the Wind was enthusiastically received when it first appeared in 1990. Its portrayal of a passage from childhood to young womanhood was praised by The Sunday Times as "a sweet-natured book which is above all a tremendous celebration of life". The Observer praised it for "the empathy with which Lakshmi Persaud writes of the natural world... and Hindu customs".Lakshmi Persaud was born in 1939 in Trinidad. She is the author of Butterfly in the Wind, Sastra and For the Love of My Name. She lives in London.

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Threatened by land speculators and ignored by a corrupt and uncaring government, the people of Roseville begin a fight for survival. In the midst of this struggle, Sonny Allen and Beatrice Salandy, burdened by the community's expectations and their own ambitions, have to work out their commitments to each other. Set on the fictional island of Santabella, You Alone are Dancing is a lyrical ballad woven from the villager's collective voices, though when a grievous wrong is done to Beatrice, she discovers the harsh truth of the novel's title.Two kinds of crime are contrasted in this novel: the crimes of the wealthy and powerful and those of the poor. The first, the theft of village land by land speculators and a rape, go unpunished, until Beatrice takes the law into her own hands.Brenda Flanagan's novel takes place in a calypso world of bobol and tricksterish deceptions and when the villagers of Roseville can take no more and pelt the visiting PM, Melda makes up an instant calypso to celebrate the occasion. It is a good one, not surprisingly when the author, by the age of thirteen, was singing calypsos and earning money for it."Every character lives and breathes... a captivating novel."Roberta MockTrinidad-born Brenda Flanagan teaches Creative Writing, Caribbean and African American Literatures at Davidson College, North Carolina. She is also a United States cultural ambassador, and has served in Kazakstan, Chad and Panama.

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What is the crisis which drives Dalip to question the sources of the person he has become? He senses that it lies in his response to the deaths of some of those closest to him. Growing up in Guyana, he must confront the tensions between the Hindu culture of his family and the Western focus of his education. Should he follow Krishna's counsel not to grieve over what is inevitable or is he denying the full emotional life which his reading of D.H. Lawrence suggests is his human province? To begin the process of realising himself, Dalip embarks on a trawl of memory, returning to his earliest days. In the process, the reader is plunged into the heart of Dalip's bafflement, his surprise, his moments of realisation."Love and death seem to be so delicately blended in this novel... a respectable addition to contemporary Caribbean literature which can with justification be selected as a text for formal study."Howard Fergus, The Caribbean Writer"A notable addition to the growing number of portraits of Indo-Guanese life..."Frank BirbalsinghSasenarine Persaud was born in Guyana. He has published two novels, a collection of stories and four collections of poetry. He currently lives and works in the USA.

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When Marie Webster, first year U.W.I. student, in half-hearted rebellion against her middle-class family, becomes involved with Singer, one of the 'riff raffs' her father despises, she enters a Jamaica whose existence she has only guessed at. What begins as an adventure turns to deadly earnest as she is drawn deeper into the turbulent life of the West Kingston yards. What follows tests her sincerity to the full. In particular, she has to map out the terms of her relationship with Singer, to deal with the contradictions between his struggle for freedom and his tendency to oppress her."Knight is a sinewy writer whose hard words and believable people make real Caribbean urban life and struggle come bursting from his pages."Chris Searle, Morning StarClyde Knight is a Jamaican. His first novel, We Shall Not Die, was published in 1983. He is a research engineer and teaches at UWI, Mona.

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Thief With Leaf won the Guyana Prize for Poetry in 1989."The distinguishing mark of Brian Chan's poems is that they constantly illuminate the moments of everyday living; wherever the poet finds himself, glimpses of actual and remembered scenes come to him in moving detail... Each poem in this selection is life-enhancing. There is no vain pursuit or striving after slogans, catchphrases, sentiment, or any other seductive, transient passions. For the poet, poetry at its best is like a best friend, trustworthy and of lasting value, an art in which to invest an individual's own quest for permanence, an art through which to converse sincerely, explore and transcend experiences, so we find in them a voice which expresses the most permanent qualities of vision. This is a collection of poems essentially of spiritual questing, Zen-like, giving at their best a quiet spiritual aura to the everyday."Jan ShinebourneBrian Chan grew up in Guyana. He is an accomplished musician and painter, and now lives in Edmonton, Canada.

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The first Indian indentured labourers arrived in the Caribbean over 150 years ago. But how are the Indian characters in these plays to live in 20th century Trinidad? These plays explore their experiences as traditional values confront a rapidly changing world. Highway in the Sun tells the story of Tiger and Urmilla's first year of marriage away from their extended family. How are they to relate to Joe and Rita, their new Afro-Creole neighbours? In Home Sweet India, Johnny, dismayed by his and his family's loss of culture, plans to return to India. But will this solve his problems? In Turn Again Tiger, Tiger learns that he cannot turn his back on the Indian past if he is to lay the ghosts of the past to rest and face the future whole. In Harvest in Wilderness, the traditional cane-cutting world of Balgobin confronts the new technology of his creolised nephew, Romesh, but the past continues to spring surprises.These plays, originally broadcast by the BBC in the 1970s, bring together Selvon's most focused attention to the choices Indians in the Caribbean must make between tradition and creolisation.Samuel (Sam) Selvon was born in San Fernando in 1923. He is the author of eleven novels, set both in Trinidad and London. He lived in London and Canada for many years. He died on a return visit to Trinidad in 1994.

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When Manko arrives in Port of Spain from his country village to begin his divine mission, he discovers that he has the gift to touch the raw nerve of other people's needs, hopes and guilts. But when he becomes enmeshed in the lives of his fellow yard-dwellers without understanding the different crosses they bear, he sets in train events which teach him too late that there are temptations and responsibilities in being a servant of the Lord for which he is ill equipped. Khan portrays the tensions between authority and freedom, law and love in Trinidadian society through Manko's fate and the stories of the other yard dwellers. Told in two voices, one standard English, the other Creole, The Crucifixion is an ironic fable of a tragi-comic self-deception. In exploring the popular folk archetype of the self-crucified preacher, the novel takes the balladic form of the calypso to greater depths."A finely constructed and movingly told novel." Chris Searle, West Indian Digest"Students of Caribbean literature will certainly be delighted that after such a long hiatus another novel by this talented Trinidadian novelist is in print..." Daryl Dance, Journal of West Indian LiteratureIsmith 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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Continuing on from his outstanding collection of literary criticism, My Strangled City and other essays, literary critic and Professor Gordon Rohlehr delves further, examining the work of Sam Selvon, Louise Bennett, Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott and many other luminaries of the Caribbean. Originally published by Longman in 1992, this is a marvellous addition to the Caribbean Modern Classics series.

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Roger Robinson’s range is wide: the joys and pains of family life; observations on the threatening edge of violence below the surface energies of Black British territories in London; memories of an older Trinidad and visits that tell him both how he and the country have changed; emblematic poems on the beauty and often bizarre strangeness of the world of animals; quizzical responses to the strange, the heartening, and the appalling in incidents encountered in daily life; reflections on the purposes and costs of making art, as in fine poems on a George Stubbs’ painting, cocaine and Coltrane’s Ascension, and questioning thoughts on the ideologies of Toni Morrison and John Milton. The poems express a fierce anger against injustice, but also convey the irrepressible sense that Roger Robinson cannot help but love people for their humour, oddity and generosity of spirit.'With A Portable Paradise, Roger Robinson shows us that he can be the voice of our communal consciousness, while at the same time always subverting, playing and beguiling with his beautiful verse' Afua Hirsch

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First published by Azul Editions in 1993, Countersong to Walt Whitman and Other Poems is the only book-length collection of Mir's poetry in English translation. The eight poems selected include several of his signature pieces from the late 1940s through the 1970s: “Countersong to Walt Whitman”; “There Is a Country in the World”; “If Somebody Wants to Know Which Is My Country”; “To the Battleship Intrepid”; “Not One Step Back”; “Amen to Butterflies”; “Concerto of Hope for the Left Hand”; “Meditation on the Shores of Evening.” The introduction by Silvio Torres-Saillant, author of Caribbean Poetics (Peepal Tree Press), and foreword by Jean Franco, author of Cruel Modernity (Duke University Press), enable a broader appreciation for the personal context and general impact of Mir's work. A selected bibliography of works by and about the poet, including an accounting of the prose he has published as a novelist, author of short stories, essayist, and historian, provides readers with ample resources for further appreciation of Mir's achievement. In his introduction, Torres-Saillant emphasizes: “The present bilingual edition... will give both Spanish- and English-speaking readers... the opportunity to recognize themselves in the poetic visage of one of the most authentic literary artists to have come from the Caribbean.” About the first publication, Roberto Márquez stated in the Village Voice: “The publication, in bilingual format, of this first book-length anthology of work by the Dominican Republic's internationally acclaimed and locally celebrated National Poet is an event—long anticipated, too long delayed... Colleague, contemporary, and the equal in lyric vitality, epic ambition, and communal significance to Pablo Neruda or Nicolás Guillén, Mir remains, with Martinique's Aimé Césaire, perhaps the most masterfully elegant and majestic among the living voices of a generation that boasts more than its share of world-class poets... [Mir's] poetry achieves a rare, exceptionally felicitous marriage of poetry and politics, of individual sensibility and the chronicling of quotidian collective drama, the still unfulfilled promise of Latin America, its landscape, peoples, and societies.”

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The endless rows of cane were withered and burnt yellowish-brown by the sun. Nearly everywhere the boys looked they saw that the furrows, which were ordinarily straight and neat, were now uneven and jagged with huge lumps of earth, fallen trash and dead weeds. It had taken weeks of dry, sizzling weather to scorch the lushness out of the plantation, to dehydrate the juice out of the cane, and to disfigure the even pattern of the furrows.It is dry season. The small village of Nain is suffering. Its people, livestock and crops have all been affected and things are looking bleak.But Seth Stone and friends Man Boy, Benjie, Double Ugly and Mango Head are determined to take matters into their own hands—with unexpected results.Praise for the original 1960s edition:"Even those who have never experienced a drought will know what it is like after reading this book. By the time the rains finally come the reader has got the idea not only of the heat and hardship, but of the people and the way of life in a Jamaican village. The four boys and their game of 'Rain' are very real, and the almost miraculous outcome of their game is completely believable. Not a book for every child, but one that will make a lasting impression on those who read it."—Children's Book News

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Caribbean Erotic is a revealing, wide-ranging and in-depth exploration of the many facets of the erotic in contemporary Caribbean literature. It includes poetry, short fiction and critical essays; work that celebrates desire, work that depicts realistically the psychology of, for instance, a woman whose desperate wish is that her abusive husband still desires her, and work that explores the role of fantasy in the erotic. Infidelity, self-respect, rape, self-love, lust and child-birth are other themes which are interpreted in the collection with honesty and insight. As an anthology, Caribbean Erotic is intended both to arouse pleasure and generate thought about what is, despite the touristic stereotypes, still a conflicted area of Caribbean literature and culture."The beauty of Caribbean Erotic is that it lifts the veils that curtain the many rooms of Caribbean sexuality; its genius is its skilful guidance through the lusty, bawdy, worshipful and spiritual wealth, as we lose our senses to find our selves." Earl Lovelace

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The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry described Kendel Hippolyte as 'perhaps the outstanding Caribbean poet of his generation'. Until now his poetry has only been available in anthologies and slim collections which have been little seen outside St. Lucia. Birthright reveals him as a poet who combines acute intelligence and passion, a barbed wit and lyrical tenderness.He writes with satirical anger from the perspective of an island marginalised by the international money markets in a prophetic voice whose ancestry is Blake, Whitman and Lawrence, married to the contemporary influences of reggae, rastafarian word-play and a dread cosmology. He writes, too, with an acute control of formal structures, of sound, rhythm and rhyme - there are sonnets and even a villanelle - but like 'Bunny Wailer flailing Apollyon with a single song', his poetry has 'a deepdown spiritual chanting rising upfull-I'. Whilst acknowledging a debt of influence and admiration to his fellow St. Lucian, Derek Walcott, Kendel Hippolyte's poetry has a direct force which is in the best sense a corrective to Walcott's tendency to romanticise the St. Lucian landscape and people."It is clear that Hippolyte's social consciousness is subordinated to his fascination with words, with the poetics of language, and so in the end we are left with a sense of having taken a journey with a poet who loves the musicality of his words. His more overtly craft conscious neo-formalist pieces are deft, efficient and never strained. Villanelles, sonnets and interesting rhyming verse show his discipline and the quiet concentration of a poet who does not write for the rat race of the publishing world, but for himself. One gets the sense of a writer working in a laboratory patiently, waiting for the right image to come, and then placing it there only when it comes. This calm, this devotion is enviable for frenetic writers like myself who act as if there is a death wish on our heads or a promise of early passing. Our poetry, one suspects, suffers. Hippolyte shows no such anxiety and the result is verse of remarkable grace and beauty."Kwame Dawes.Kendel Hippolyte was born in St.Lucia in 1952, he studied and lived in Jamaica in the 1970s, where he explored his talents as a poet, playwright and director.

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A scholarly and entertaining study of words, phrases and idioms which reflects the diverse social and linguistic currents within which the Indian South African community has developed. It focuses on the effects of language contact in borrowings, grammatical interference and semantic shifts as speakers of Indic languages came into contact with speakers of English, Afrikaans, Fanagalo and African languages. It focuses on the Indic lexical items which are common to all speakers, irrespective of whether their ancestral language was Tamil or Bhojpuri; on the lexical items restricted to particular subgroups depending on their ancestral language. It further annotates the idiomatic and slang phrases found principally amongst speakers of SAIE and identifies the specific grammatical and phonological features which characterise this variety of English. Mesthrie's work shows clearly both the distinctiveness of SAIE and its South Africanness. This lexicon provides an invaluable source of comparison with Indian English, the Creoles of the Caribbean, and with the linguistic experience of other overseas South Asian communities."Mesthrie's A Lexicon of South African Indian English, described by the author as a supplement (and also complement) to the 1980 edition of A Dictionary of South African English (ed. Jean Branford) is a valuable and interesting endeavour in its own right. It is a valid contribution to the study of language and should appeal to students of linguistics, sociologists, anthropologists and cultural historians. The Lexicon also adds to the growing body of works on the contributions of the Indian South Africans."Rambhajun Sitaram, LexicosRajend Mesthrie was born in Durban, South Africa. He wrote his doctorate on the transformation of Bhojpuri in South Africa. He currently teaches linguistics at the University of Cape Town.

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