Search results for ""peepal tree press ltd""

A young Guyanese woman sets out to write an historical novel based on the 1823 Demerara Slave Rebellion and the fate of an English missionary who is condemned to hang for his alleged part in the uprising, but who dies in prison before his execution. She has wanted to document historical fact through fiction, but the characters she invents make an altogether messier intrusion into her life with their conflicting interests and ambivalent motivations. As an African-Guyanese in a country where a Black ruling elite oppresses the population, she begins to wonder what lay behind her 'ancestral enslavement', why fellow Africans had 'exchanged silver for the likes of me'. As a committed Christian, she also wonders why God has allowed slavery to happen. Beset by her unruly characters and these questions, the novel is stymied. In an attempt to unblock it, she decides that she should take up a family contact to spend some time in Nigeria, to experience her African origins at first hand. For a couple of years, falling in love, marriage to a Nigerian university professor and the birth of their first child silence the characters in her head. Then the hanging of a family friend by El Presidente, Butcher Boy's murderous military regime brutally plunges her back into the world of her novel. To her consternation, one after the other, the seven main characters in the novel reveal themselves in contemporary Nigerian guise and she finds herself implicated in uncomfortably personal ways in a narrative where the distinctions between her 'life' and the 'fiction' she is writing have become utterly permeable. Almost uncontrollably, the novel begins to write itself. To try to regain the semblance of control, she falls back on a game of childhood, Hangman, which she plays with the Nigerian 'manifestation' of the most personally threatening of her characters, as a form of sympathetic magic to try to ensure her survival. Not until the last page do we know whether she succeeds. Karen King-Aribisala has written a densely layered, challengingly ambitious work of fiction. There is the actual historical novel, her thoughts about it, the drama of her life in Nigeria and the seepage between the different worlds. As such, "The Hangman's Game" has much to say about the Guyanese past and present, and the nature of postcolonial power in both Africa and the Caribbean. And, if "The Hangman's Game" is provocatively post-modern in its self-reflexivity on the nature of both historical and fictional writing, its ideas are dramatically communicated through action in a novel that is rich in tension, dark humour and complex, strikingly drawn characters.

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Jacqueline Bishop was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, before coming to the United States to attend college -- and to be reunited with her mother. She is the founding editor of Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts & Letters and is presently editing a film on a group of Jamaican untutored artists called The Intuitives. She has been published in The Caribbean Writer, Crab Orchard Review, Macomere, Renaissance Noire and Wasafiri amongst other journals. She lives and works in New York City ... the 15th parish of Jamaica.

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The essays in this collection focus on the rich dialogue carried out in David Dabydeen's increasingly diverse and critically acclaimed body of writing. Dialogue across diversity and the simultaneous habitation of multiple arenas are seen as dominant characteristics of his work. Essays by Aleid Fokkema, Tobias Doring, Heike Harting and Madina Tlostanova provide rewardingly complex readings of Dabydeen's 'Turner', locating it within a revived tradition of Caribbean epic (with reference to Walcott, Glissant and Arion), as subverting and appropriating the romantic aesthetics of the sublime and in the connections between the concept of terror in both Turner's painting and in Fanon's classic works on colonisation. Lee Jenkins and Pumla Gqola explore Dabydeen's fondness for intertextual reference, with the nature of canonic authority and ideas about the masculine. Michael Mitchell, Mark Stein, Christine Pagnoulle and Gail Low focus Dabydeen's more recent fiction, "Disappearance", "A Harlot's Progress" and "The Counting House". By dealing with his more recent work and looking more closely at Dabydeen's Indo-Guyanese background, this collection complements the earlier "Art of David Dabydeen".

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

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The young narrator of "The Intended" is twelve when he leaves his village in rural Guyana to come to England. There, he is abandoned into social care, but with great determination and self-discipline seizes every opportunity to follow his aunt's farewell advice, 'but you must take education...pass plenty exam' and wins a scholarship to Oxford. With an upper-class white fiancee, he has unquestionably arrived, but at the cost of ignoring the other part of his aunt's farewell: '...you is we, remember you is we.' Through remembering his Guyanese childhood and youth in working class Balham, the narrator's older self explores the contradictions, the difficulties implicit in his aunt's advice and the cost to his personality of losing that past. At one level a moving semi-autobiographical novel, "The Intended" is also a sophisticated postcolonial text with its echoes of 'Heart of Darkness', its play between language registers and its exploration of the instability of identity. As an Indo-Guyanese, the narrator finds himself seen as 'Paki' by the English, and as some mongrel hybrid by 'real' Asians from India and Pakistan; as sharing a common British 'Blackness', yet acutely conscious of the real cultural divisions between Guyanese of African and Indian origins.

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

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As a young man of twenty, Thomas Inkle sets out for Barbados to inspect the family sugar estates. On the way he is shipwrecked on a small West Indian island inhabited by Carib Indians. He alone escapes as his shipmates are slaughtered, and is rescued by Yarico, a Carib woman who takes him as, 'an ideal, strange and obliging lover.' So begins an erotic encounter, explored with poetic, imaginative intensity, which has a profound effect on both.Amongst the Caribs, Inkle is a mere child, whose survival depends entirely on Yarico's favour and protection. But when he is rescued and taken with Yarico to the slave island of Barbados, she is entirely at his mercy.Inkle and Yarico is loosely based on a 'true' story which became a much repeated popular narrative in the 17th and 18th centuries. Beryl Gilroy reinterprets its mythic dimensions from both a woman's and a black perspective, but above all she engages the reader in the psychological truths of her characters' experiences.As an old man, Inkle recalls the Carib's stories as being like 'fresh dreams, newly washed, newly woven and true to the daily lives of the community'. Inkle and Yarico has the same magic and pertinence. As a narrative of deep historical insight into the commodification and abuse of humanity, Gilroy lays the past bare as a text for the present.Beryl Gilroy came to London over fifty years ago from Guyana. She wrote six novels, two autobiographical books and was a pioneering teacher and psychotherapist. Sadly, she died in 2000 at the age of 76.

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Howard Fergus's poems explore the nature of living on Montserrat, a 'two-be-three island/hard like rock', vulnerable to the forces of nature (Hurricane Hugo and the erupting Soufriere) and still 'this British corridor'. He writes honestly and observantly about these contingencies, finding in them metaphors for experiences which are universal. Nature's force strips life to its bare essentials ('Soufriere opened a new bible/in her pulpit in the hills/ to teach us the arithmetic of days') and reveals creation and destruction as one ('We celebrate Hugo child of God/ he killed and made alive for a season').In a small island society, individual lives take on an enhanced significance: they are its one true resource and the sequence of obituary poems brings home with especial force how irreplaceable they are. Beyond Montserrat, Fergus looks for a wider Caribbean unity, but finds it only in cricket (and crime). Cricket, indeed, provides a major focus for his sense of the ironies of Caribbean history: that through a white-flannelled colonial rite with its roots in an imperial sense of Englishness, the West Indies has found its only true political framework and the means, explored in the sequence of poems celebrating Brian Lara's feats of 1994, to overturn symbolically the centuries of enslavement and colonialism."Fergus is a poet of real stature."Stewart Brown, Longman Caribbean New Voices 1"Fergus reaches his peak with fine poems dedicated to his friends, none among them as penetrating as Timo. A larger-than-life character, Timo is good from the heart and generous to the bone. This archetypal character is fast disappearing, and Fergus reminds us through a last bedside visit. But he does something else that rings true. He captures Timo's essentially nativist language, the lingua franca of the praise-song; this poem is no wooden obituary. Far beyond the mythic spectator fields of Lord's and mythic Elysium, we applaud Fergus on this second stride to the wicket. His first poetic volume, "Allioguana," rightfully alluded to the rich incantatory Amerindian legacy of this island. A mature poet, Howard A. Fergus is caught playing in familiar themes far afield."Edgar Othniel Lake, The Caribbean WriterHoward Fergus was born at Long Ground in Montserrat. His poetry began appearing from 1976, with Cotton Rhymes; Green Innocence (1978), Stop the Carnival (1980), and his poems have been anthologised in the Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse and appeared in Artrage, Writing Ulster, Bim, The New Voices, Caribbean Quarterly, Ambit, Caribanthology and others. His most recent collection is Volcano Verses (Peepal Tree, 2003).

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Mount Vesuvius in Eight Frames is a slim volume containing eight poems by Sudeep Sen and eight etchings by Peter Standen. The poems are meditations on the aftermath of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, which destroyed the Italian city of Pompeii, and the etchings provide pictorial representations of the love-death nexus on which these meditations focus. Together the poems and the etchings evoke an ironic vision of the perennial "macabreness" of the Vesuvian catastrophe. Between them they conjure up an intriguing "idyll" of unlamented mortality, with neither solemnity nor sentimentality attending on the singular phenomenon of death dreaming of life."Joseph John, World Literature TodaySudeep Sen lives and works in New Delhi & London. He is the editorial director of AARK ARTS.

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After false starts in teaching and social work, Melda Hayley finds her mission in fostering the damaged children of the first generation of black settlers in a deeply racist Britain. But though Melda finds daily uplift in her work, her inner life starts to come apart. Her brother Arnie has married a white woman and his defection from the family and the distress Melda witnesses in the children she fosters causes her own buried wounds to weep. Melda confronts the cruelties she has suffered as the 'outside child' at the hands of her stepmother. But though the past drives Melda towards breakdown, she finds strengths there too, especially in the memories of the loving, supporting women of the yards. And there is Pa who, in his new material security in the USA, discovers a gentle caring side and teaches his family to sing in praise of love and children.Beryl Gilroy came to London over fifty years ago from Guyana. She wrote six novels, two autobiographical books and was a pioneering teacher and psychotherapist. Sadly, she died in 2000 at the age of 76.

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'The way I see it, a country with a stupid shape like this one can't have too much smart people in it.' On the contrary, as Reuben's diatribe reveals, 'paper-bag shaped' Trinidad is full of schemers and dreamers. Maharaj's characters struggle heroically, though sometimes comically and oddly, to make their mark on the earth. It is as if the more frustrating their outward circumstances, the more intense their inner lives.Bashir Ali, the librarian, has developed an intimate relationship with his books, and a passionate hatred of their borrowers. 'Bhaji and rice! You put bhaji and rice on top of Virginia!' Hoobnath Hingoo, the metalwork technician, imagines a dire fate for the arrogant young engineers who lord it around the oil refinery. 'Barbecue the whole side of them. Grill them nice and black. Afterwards we could have a sale. Grill engineers. Going cheap. Eat as much as you like...' And of course there is Roop, the writer, who wants to escape from his gas station 'to write that book... about everything I ever thought of since I born.'Anyone who enjoys the comedies of V.S. Naipaul will find great pleasure in Maharaj's elegant and arresting style, but they will also find in Maharaj a profound empathy and understanding of his characters and their world. In the process, he gives a rewarding and insightful portrayal of the Indo-Trinidadian world in the late 20th century.Rabindranth Maharaj was born in Trinidad. He now lives and teaches in Toronto. Several further collections of his stories have been published in Canada.

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These poems grow out of the persistence of Brown's memories of childhood in rural Jamaica - the twilight world of duppies and rolling calf and minds inhabiting both Protestantism and obeah. After thirty years in North America, the stubborn endurance of these haunting presences, an apparent maladjustment to the present, comes to signify a complex sense of ancestry and spiritual continuity. They represent, too, a last line of defence against the homogenising sweep of American cultural imperialism. Whilst 'belonging is yesterday's faint memory', these poems are intensely alive, sometimes meditative, sometimes angry.Lloyd W. Brown graduated from UWI, Mona in 1961. Since then he has taught in Canada and the USA. He is the author of the study West Indian Poetry, amongst other critical titles.

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Sadly now a posthumous collection, Snowscape with Signature shows Hopkinson to have been not only a pre-eminent recorder of 20th century Caribbean upheaval, of social indifference, wasteful violence and conflicts of race and politics, but a deeply moving poet of the inner person who can 'speak praise to heaven for this man's handicaps / which have stripped him at last down to himself'. As a convert to Islam, Hopkinson also wrote some of the finest religious poetry to come from the Caribbean. In his adeptness with the 'sweet fetters' of form on a surprising fluidity of perception, Hopkinson will surely come to be seen as not only one of the Caribbean's finest poets, but an outstanding poet in any company.The collection is introduced by the leading Caribbean poet and critic, Mervyn Morris."Hopkinson's poems are tightly disciplined but his imagination ranges at will, his capacity to surprise makes every one of his poems worth reading." Mario Relich, Lines ReviewAbdhur-Rahman Slade Hopkinson was born in Guyana in 1934. He lived in Barbados and Jamaica until, suffering from kidney failure, he went to Canada in 1970. He was an actor and dramatist of the greatest ability.

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Brian Chan's poetry goes beyond everyday appearance to the inner space where the consciousness "begins to question the power of space it has fictioned". In staring into the abyss over which such fictions are spun, Fabula Rasa challenges all comfortable and solid assumptions. Thus, those poems which affirm the power of love or celebrate those moments 'brimming with light', seem both more powerful and more movingly vulnerable in their act of affirmation. Chan's poetry requires close attention but has a pellucid quality: "Plumbing my darkest heart, I shape the glass/ of plain mind in which you may taste your own".Brian Chan grew up in Guyana. He is an accomplished musician and painter, and now lives in Edmonton, Canada.

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Rachel Manley's poems explore loss and grief in a life-enhancing way. They confront this most universal of experiences with an exactness to feeling, in language which is simple on the surface and complex in its depths. Death is no terrifying abstraction, but part of life and love, humanised through its associations with the particular. Life is always present in the richly evoked Caribbean world."Enchanting... like Chopin preludes."Louis Simpson"A Light Left On... reveals the rich lyricism of her verse, the musicality of her voice, and the clarity and enduring optimism of her vision." The Caribbean WriterRachel Manley was born in Jamaica in 1947. Her father was the late Prime Minister, Michael Manley, her grandparents Norman and Edna Manley. She is the author of the prize-winning Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood (1996).

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Realistic and magical, sombre and deeply comic, heroic and full of ironies, these stories explore the complexities of Caribbean reality through a variety of voices and forms. In 'Jacob Bubbles', a short novella, Campbell connects the contemporary Jamaica of political gang warfare to the past of slavery through the characters of Jacob, a runaway slave and his descendant, Jacob Bubbles, the fearsome leader of the Suckdust Posse. When Jacob Bubbles meets a violent death, a memory path opens in his head which carries him back to his slave ancestor. The contrast between the two stories raises uncomfortable questions about what progress there has been for the most oppressed sections of Jamaican society. Yet if there is in these stories an acute perception of the ways in which poverty, racism and sexism can maim the spirit, there is an overarching vision of the redemptive power of hope and love and the people's capacity to rise out of enslavements old and new. In bringing us, amongst others, Singerman, the Calypsonian, Quincey, the business man who turns into a bird, Jocelyn who cannot tell a lie and the inseparable Mr Fargo and Mr Lawson, Hazel Campbell shows herself to be one of the Caribbean's finest writers of short fiction.Hazel Campbell is Jamaican. Before publishing Singerman with Peepal Tree, she published The Rag Doll and Woman's Tongue. She works as a media consultant.

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In this suite of poems, Roopnaraine dramatises both the universality and the particularity of the miraculous gift of love. As for Donne and his world 'contracted thus', love brings 'All of space in a narrow bed'. That space is rich in the resonances of place and time. England, Italy and Guyana are not only the backcloths against which the drama is acted out, but the points of literary reference which make these poems a celebration of the word as well as the flesh. We hear echoes of Ovid's Amores, and every so often absent Guyana breaks through into consciousness like the 'Spurwings on lily-leaves on a London pavement'. "The sequence as a whole shimmers with dazzling imagery... and the urgency of a poem that needed to be written."Mario Relich, Lines Review.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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Demerary Telepathy was Sasenarine Persaud's first collection of poems. He writes very consciously as an Indo-Guyanese and the collection, published in 1989, reflects a deep Indo-Guyanese ambivalence to the then experience of living in Guyana: an intense attachment to the land and a sharply alienated consciousness of political and cultural oppression. His evocations of landscapes, particularly riverscapes, are immersed in a Hindu way of seeing which seeks out correspondences between man and nature, whilst those poems which deal sharply and often wittily with affairs of state reflect a fear of unbelonging. The poems in the last part of the collection deal perceptively with love and attachment.Sasenarine 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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The backdam people of Lusignan Estate have left the sugar company's cramped barrack housing and moved to their own individual houses in Annandale Village. They enjoy better conditions, freedom from interference by the estate authorities and more involvement in the wider life of Guyana. But something has gone - the old closeness, the old certainties - as the people exchange their communal life for their own separate 'high houses', and the coherent Indianness of the estate days is challenged by the new messages brought by the radio, politicians and 'clap-hand' Christians.In these stories of trade unionists, cooks, cricketers, political activists, rogues and small boys, Monar creates a vivid, picaresque world of people struggling to make sense of changes which they are experiencing at the deepest levels of consciousness. The same character who invests his energies in trickster strategems can also cry out in depair, 'No meaning, no purpose. O Gawd is where yuh deh?' In focusing on the 1950s and 1960s, several of the stories confront the tendency towards amnesia with regard to the outbreak of ethnic conflict between the Indians of Annandale and the Africans of neighbouring Buxton. The last story in the collection reflects on the next stage of the journey as the former backdam people begin to leave Guyana for new lives in Britain. These stories are told in the creole voices of their characters.Rooplall Monar was born on the Lusignan sugar estate in Guyana in 1945. Apart from brief overseas visits he has lived in Guyana all his life, in Annandale village, East Coast Demerara.

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In calling this collection Yoruba from Cuba, a phrase from the poem 'Son Número 6', the translator, Salvador Ortiz-Carboneres, draws attention to Guillén's pioneering embrace, more than sixty years ago, of an African identity in Cuba. His selection shows Guillén constantly returning to the theme of race and the historical legacies of slavery in both the Caribbean and the USA. But in poems such as 'Balada de los Dos Abuelos', Guillén is also seen stressing the mulatez heterogeneity of Cuban culture in drawing on African, European and other immigrant traditions. As a life-long Marxist and anti-imperialist, Guillén celebrated the Cuban revolution, including the heroic example of Che Guevara, but he also addressed the tendency to a repressive puritanism within the ruling party in such important poems as 'Digo que yo no soy un hombre puro'. In this dual language selection of one of the outstanding poets of the Hispanic world, Salvador Ortiz-Carboneres has created lively, very readable English versions that capture both the colloquial vigour of Guillén's language and the incantatory rhythms of those of the poems where he draws on the dance patterns of the Cuban 'son'. The selection covers the range of Guillén's work from Poemas de Transición (1927-1931) up to poems from La Rueda Dentada and El Diario que a Diario, both of 1972. With a translator's preface, an introduction by the distinguished scholar of Cuban culture, Professor Alistair Hennessy, notes, a chronology and a reading list, this is an edition that will bring Guillén's powerful and epochal poetry to both the general reader and to the student. His work is unquestionably one of the towering landmarks of Caribbean poetry.Salvador Ortiz-Carboneres teaches Spanish language and Latin American poetry at the Language Centre, University of Warwick.

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The Animated Universe is the long-awaited debut of a seasoned poet who has traveled the world honing her craft and, in the process, settling into the assurance and confidence in her voice. These poems reflect her movement, but above all they speak to her core belief in the power of empathy and compassion as aesthetic markers. In “signs” she writes, “Everywhere I go/ I see the people I love in the faces of strangers,..” Her poems range across three modes of seeing: the ode that reveals her penchant for finding beauty in the unusual, in the ordinary and in the disquieting things of the world; her legends, which are the mythologizing of daily life that only great calypsonians and natural storytellers are able to achieve; and finally, her lyric disrobing of her heart, her soul and her body—a sacrifice she makes with heart because of her strong conviction that the sharing of self is a healing quality of poetry: “I am a figment/ of God’s imagination. / I am more than/ I say. I am./ I am who I am/ becoming.” If there are echoes of Ntosake Shange here, it is because, like Shange, Thornhill understands the deeply spiritual function of the poet, and she embraces the role of the poet as a a priestess in service of the community. And yet, in all of this, we find in Thornhill the splendid tensions and graces of an immigrant’s imagination and language, rooted as she is in her Trinidad birthplace, and her uneasy American home. There is a throw-back quality to her rhymes, invoking in the long-breathed journey to the satisfaction of rhyme, the “def” stage, the spoken-world space during its emergent height. But this is the beginning of the formal exploration. Thornhill, the poet, was made by the energy and immediacy of the stage, a poetry willing to improvise through elliptical leaps while being grounded in sound, rich sound, and the satisfaction of the rhyme’s reliability, and above all, while grounded in the story, the tall tale, the myth-making.

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Set in Jamaica in the late 1980s and 1990s, Prophets is a poem of rhythmic and metaphoric inventiveness that portrays the social and cultural resonances of Jamaican society along with the tension between an ebullient cynicism and a heartfelt desire for faith. As 24-hour television, belching out the voices of American hellfire preachers, competes with dancehall, slackness, and ganja for Jamaican minds, Clarice and Thalbot preach their own conflicting visions. Clarice has used her gifts to raise herself from the urban Jamaican ghetto. She basks in the adulation of her followers as they look to her for their personal salvation. Thalbot has fallen from comfort and security onto the streets. With his wild matted hair and nakedness, he is a deranged voice in the wilderness. Whilst Clarice has her blue-eyed Jesus, Thalbot brandishes his blackness in the face of every passer-by. But when, under cover of darkness, Clarice "sins" on the beach, Thalbot alone knows of her fall. He sets out to journey, like Jonah, to denounce the prophetess and warn the Ninevite city of its coming doom. An epic struggle begins.

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The poet and musician Anthony Joseph met and spoke to Lord Kitchener just once, in 1984, when he found the calypso icon standing alone for a moment in the heat of Port of Spain’s Queen’s Park Savannah, one Carnival Monday afternoon. It was a pivotal meeting in which the great calypsonian, outlined his musical vision, an event which forms a moving epilogue to Kitch, Joseph’s unique biography of the Grandmaster.Lord Kitchener (1922 - 2000) was one of the most iconic and prolific calypso artists of the 20th century. He was one of calypso’s most loved exponents, an always elegantly dressed troubadour with old time male charisma and the ability to tap into the musical and cultural consciousness of the Caribbean experience. Born into colonial Trinidad in 1922, he emerged in the 1950s, at the forefront of multicultural Britain, acting as an intermediary between the growing Caribbean community, the islands they had left behind, and the often hostile conditions of life in post War Britain. In the process Kitch, as he was affectionally called, single handedly popularised the calypso in Britain.Kitch represents the first biographical study of Aldwyn Roberts, according to calypso lore, christened Lord Kitchener, because of his stature and enthusiasm for the art form. Utilising an innovative, polyvocal style which combines life-writing with poetic prose, the narrative alternates between first person anecdotes by Kitchener’s fellow calypsonians, musicians, lovers and rivals, and lyrically rich fictionalised passages. By focussing equally on Kitchener’s music as on his hitherto undocumented private and political life, Joseph gets to the heart of the man behind the music and the myth, reaching behind the sobriquet, to present a holistic portrait of the calypso icon.

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Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné’s poems inhabit a world of permeable barriers and transformations between men and women, humans and animals, the hunters and the hunted and the living and the dead. Her collection creates for us vivid images of the rural Trinidadian world, where she grew up and still lives in. This is a world where the real and the mythical rub shoulders, where people know about the magical properties of plants, where anything can happen, where “everything that breathes will howl”. What emerges from her vivid word pictures are images of the complexity of family ties, of motherhood that is both tender and fearsome, of an intimacy with the natural world which is torn between fears for its fragility and hopes for its resilience. In the words of Shivanee Ramlochan, “Boodoo-Fortuné’s lines are primed for simplicity and brutality alike… of the promises stirring within buried bones… and all manner of unknowable, mysterious selves.”As the recent winner of the Holick-Arvon and Wasafiri poetry prizes, Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné is a powerful new voice in poetry.

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

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