Search results for ""Peepal Tree Press Ltd""

Leigh McCaulay left Jamaica for New York at fifteen following her parents’ divorce. In the wake of her mother’s death fifteen years later, she returns to the island to find her estranged father and the family secrets he holds. Her story is told against the background of two other McCaulays who arrived in Jamaica in the 18th and 19th centuries. As a white Jamaican, Leigh has to think about her own belonging.Back In Jamaica after years away, Leigh McCaulay encounters the familiarity of home along with the strangeness of being white in a black country, and struggles with guilt and confusion over her part in an oppressive history of white slave owners and black slaves.As Leigh begins to make an adult life on the island, she learns of her ancestors – Zachary Macaulay, a Scot sent as a young man to be a bookkeeper on a sugar plantation in 18th century Jamaica who, after witnessing and participating in the brutality of slavery, becomes an abolitionist; and John Macaulay, a missionary who comes to Jamaica in the 19th century to save souls and ends up questioning the foundations of his beliefs.Part historical and part contemporary literary fiction, loosely based on the author’s own family history, Huracan explores how we navigate the inequalities and privileges we are born to and the possibilities for connectedness and social transformation in everyday contemporary life. But it is also the story of an island’s independence; of the people who came (those who prospered and those who were murdered); of crimes and acts of mercy; and the search for place, love and redemption.Diana McCaulay is a Jamaican writer, newspaper columnist and environmental activist. She has written four earlier novels, including Dog-Heart (2010) and Huracan (2012), published by Peepal Tree Press. Both books met with critical acclaim and have broken local publishing records. Her latest novel, Daylight Come, will be published in September 2020.

Read more less

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

Read more less

Ricky Thomas, brother Doug and sister Polly spend their summer holidays in the coffee walk surrounding their grandparents' country home in Dallas, Jamaica. There they play games of 'Three on a Desert Island'. It's a sunbaking day in July. Above the children the leaves of the mango and coffee trees are drying, the thin asphalt becoming syrupy beneath their feet, the atmosphere electric with the sun's heat.But while Ricky scouts for an observation platform for his imaginary island, the children feel it. They feel the earth itself move beneath them. Is it part of their vivid imaginations—or is it the sign of a coming earthquake?"Strongly recommended." The School Librarian"...a cleverly constructed story of mounting tension... " Junior Bookshelf"This is a fine story, a worthy successor to Hurricane ...' British Book News

Read more less

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

Read more less

When the killing starts in Dhaka, the villagers know the army from West Pakistan will soon be in their area, but unlike the other young men, and his beloved step-sister Moni Banu, Kamal cannot join the resistance. Born with a hole for a mouth, most people, except Abbas Miah, the teacher who adopts him, his friends and Moni Banu, regard him as the village idiot. With Abbas Miah, Kamal embarks on a Noah's ark journey, with the motley survivors of the massacre that inevitably comes, to find refuge in the distant floodplains until the war is over. Along with a bombastic old actor, the village mullah, the village cut-throat, two Hindu boatmen, a foul-mouthed old woman, and a pious Islamist, who might just be a collaborator, Kamal discovers that there can be no escape from the war and the issues it raises.As our guide to the painful emergence of the new nation of Bangladesh, Kamal is forced both to observe the face of evil, the complexity of betrayal, and look within to discover whether he has the capacity for true community, whether he can follow the injunction: 'If someone knocks on your door, you don't ask who it is. You don't even look at their face. You just do everything you can for them.'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

Read more less

It is 1961 and a 'Labour' party rules the self-governing colony of Barbados, but the sugar estate workers wonder whether slavery has ever really ended. Austin C. Clarke's first novel rages against the 'White' alliance of the land-owning class and the church, and their Black supporters. Protagonist Rufus stands up, determined that this is not how things should be. First published in 1964, this is a young man's book whose acerbic comedy of status, play-acting and double-dealing in the village remains a powerful debut in a distinguished literary career.Austin C. Clarke was born in Barbados in 1934 in a poor single parent family with an absent father. He left for Canada in 1955, settling in Toronto. His first two novels are set in Barbados, but thereafter much of his fiction has focused on the lives of West Indians in Canada, as a result of which he has been hailed as the country's first multicultural writer. One exception is his recent novel, The Polished Hoe (2002), which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and is set in 1930s Barbados. He is the author of eleven novels, six short-story collections and several works of memoir. In 1998, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada.

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

Offering a richly nuanced portrayal placing Haiti in a global context as a place of ethnic and cultural complexity, this novel explores the role of spirituality in Caribbean life and culture. Told through multiple voices in a nonlinear fashion, the narrative unfolds through the perspectives of a Haitian-Syrian merchant, Ruth, who recounts her young adulthood and final days as she intuits her imminent death; Catherine, a professional pianist living in Paris who travels home to Haiti upon hearing of her Aunt Ruth's murder; Rose, Catherine's mother, an empath, who is believed to have committed suicide in Canadian exile in reaction to the worst years of the Duvalier regime; Romulus, a once famous Konpa singer and an addict, who, released by rebels from a Port-au-Prince jail searches for his redemption; and Elsie, an Irish, working-class seer who emigrates to Haiti in 1847 in search of a new mystic who will guide them all. Traversing the terrains of Port-au-Prince middle-class life, working-class French Canada, expatriate Paris, the peat bogs of famine stricken Ireland, and tracing lives that cross boundaries of time and place, this is a deeply absorbing portrayal of a fragmented community whose deepest connections lie in a shared sense of spirituality.

Read more less

Winner of a Casa de las Américas Prize 2010, one of Latin America's oldest and most prestigious literary awards.The jury said the collection "captures a sense of the complexities of historical, social and cultural aspects of contemporary Caribbean".Jennifer Rahim's poems move seamlessly between the inwardly confessional, an acute sensitivity to the distinctive subjectivities of an immediate circle of family, friends and neighbours, and a powerful sense of Trinidadian place and history. Few have written more movingly or perceptively of what can vex the relationship between daughters and mothers, or with such a mixture of compassion and baffled rage about a daughter's relationship to her father. If Sylvia Plath comes to mind, acknowledged in the poem 'Lady Lazarus in the Sun', the comparison does Rahim no disfavours; Rahim's voice and world is entirely her own. There is in her work a near perfect balance between the disciplined craft of the poems, and their capacity to deal with the most traumatic of experiences in a cool, reflective way. Equally, she has the capacity to make of the ordinary something special and memorable.Here is no self-indulgent misery memoir, not least in its compassion and involvement with other lives. The threat and reality of fragmentation – of psyche's, of lives, of a nation – is ever present, but the shape and order of the poems provide a saving frame of wholeness. Poem after poem offers phrases of a satisfying weight and appositeness, like the description of the killers of a boy as 'mere children,/ but twisted like neglected fields of cane'.Jennifer Rahim is Trinidadian. She also writes short fiction and criticism. She is currently Senior Lecturer at The Liberal Arts Department, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad.

Read more less

Ramgolall, an old Indian cow-minder, has punished himself to save money and has built a sizeable herd. His first daughter is the long-established mistress of a well-to-do white planter. Their son, his grandson, Geoffry, light-skinned and ambitious, seems destined for success. But when Geoffry becomes involved with Kattree, his daughter by a second marriage, Ramgolall's world begins to fall apart.This classic work of West Indian fiction, first published in 1941, is much more than a pioneering and acute portrayal of the rural Indo-Guyanese world; it is a work of literary ambition that creates a symphonic relationship beween its characters and the vast openness of the Corentyne coast.This beautiful new edition features an introduction by Mittelholzer scholar Juanita Cox.

Read more less

This collection of work by the late Neville Dawes (1926-1984) gives unrivalled access to his thoughts on a rural Jamaican childhood, his exposure to Oxbridge modernism, and his involvement in nationalist ferment, and the frustrations of postcolonial politics.The book makes available the fine poems that Dawes wrote, mostly between 1950 and 1970, both as the young man in London exploring a modernist voice and as the ideologically-committed poet returning to his roots. Fugue also includes the celebrated short stories broadcast on the BBC's Caribbean Voices programme, along with pieces of insightful and humorous autobiography and a section devoted to his critical writing. A long introductory essay by Kwame Dawes brings both a scholar's studied contextualisation and a son's moving insight.Neville Dawes was born in Nigeria in 1926, but grew up in rural Jamaica. He studied for an MA at Oxford, taught in Jamaica, Ghana and Guyana, and was later appointed Director of the Institute of Jamaica. He wrote two novels, The Last Enchantment, reissued by Peepal Tree in 2009 as part of their Caribbean Modern Classics series, and Interim. Always a Marxist, he was deeply immersed in Africa and his nationalist identification with the rural Jamaican working class.

Read more less

The Children of Sisyphus is the story of Dinah, a prostitute who lives and fails to find love on the Dungle, the rubbish heap where the very poorest squat. Trapped by patriarchy and male passivity, and cursed by one of her rivals, Dinah is forced into a panicked flight to save herself. But involvement with a revival church and the favour of Shepherd John, who proposes a new life outside Jamaica, leads her to the delusion that she has found escape and meaning, a lived lie that has tragic consequences.In Patterson's brutally poetic existentialist novel, dignity comes with a stoic awareness of the absurdity of life.Introduced by Kwame Dawes.Orlando Patterson was born in Jamaica in 1940. Having studied at the University of the West Indies and at the London School of Economics, in 1970 he took the position of Visiting Associate Professor at Harvard, where he is now John Cowles Professor of Sociology. The Children of Sisyphus received the First Prize for Fiction at the Dakar Festival of Negro Arts in 1966. His other novels are An Absence of Ruins (1967) and Die the Long Day (1972). He was awarded the Order of Distinction by the Government of Jamaica in 1999.

Read more less

When Gregory Hawke, a burnt-out case from the Spanish civil war, seeks refuge at the remote utopian commune his uncle, the Reverend Harmston, has set up among the local Amerindians one hundred miles up the Berbice River, he finds a society devoted to 'Hard work, frank love and wholesome play'. Apparently free-thinking and ecologically green before its time, Gregory finds much in Berkelhoost to attract him, particularly when his pretty cousin Mabel shows an unmistakeable interest. But there is an authoritarian side to the project that alarms Gregory's democratic instincts and it is this which makes it impossible to read the novel, first published in 1951, without seeing elements of prophecy – of the fate of the People's Temple commune at Jonestown in Guyana in 1978.No such dreadful end awaits the generality of the communards, but in this most inventive of Mittelholzer's novels there are darker notes beneath the generally comic tone. Edgar Mittelholzer was born in British Guiana in 1909. He wrote more than twenty novels. He eventually settled in England, where he lived until his death in 1965, a suicide predicted in several of his novels.

Read more less

Raymond Ramcharitar's vision is rooted in Trinidad, but as a globalised island with permeable borders, frequent birds of passage, and outposts in New York and London. One of the collection's outstanding qualities is that it is both utterly contemporary and written with a profound and disturbed sense of the history that shapes the island. As befits fiction from the home of carnival and mas', it is a collection much concerned with the flesh - often in transgressive forms as if characters are driven to test their boundaries - and with the capacity of its characters to reinvent themselves in manifold, and sometimes outrageous disguises. One of the masks is race, and the stories are acerbically honest about the way tribal loyalties distort human relations. Its tone ranges from the lyric - Trinidad as an island of arresting beauty - to a seaminess of the most grungy kind. It has an ambition that challenges a novel such as V.S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men, but is written with the anger and the compassion of a writer for whom the island still means everything. In the novella, 'Froude's Arrow', Ramcharitar has written a profound fiction that tells us where the Caribbean currently is in juxtaposing the deep, still to be answered questions about island existence (the fragmentations wrought by history, the challenges of smallness in the global market, race and class divides) and the scrabbling for survival, fame and fortune that arouse the ire of Ramcharitar's acerbic and satirical vision.Raymond Ramcharitar was born in Trinidad. He worked as a journalist and is the author of a controversial and provocative study of the deficiencies of the Trinidadian press, Breaking the News: Media & Culture in Trinidad.

Read more less

John Robert Lee brings a quiet, reflective, often autobiographical approach to his concerns with Caribbean life, art and faith. Within carefully crafted formal structures – and some experimentation with traditional forms – he finds the space to give his voice and persona free rein. Whilst rooted in St. Lucia and Caribbean culture, he takes the whole world as his arena – as much at home writing about Boston as Castries.Undoubtedly the foremost Caribbean Christian writer of his generation, his is a truly incarnational view of faith, anchored in the reality of human experience and expressed in richly textured images of Caribbean landscapes, dress, street life, music, dance and his native Creole language. "Robert Lee has been a scrupulous poet, that's the biggest virtue that he has, and it's not a common virtue in poets, to be scrupulous and modest in the best sense, not to over-extend the range of the truth of his emotions, not to go for the grandiose. He is a Christian poet obviously. You don't get in the poetry anything that is, in a sense, preachy or self-advertising in terms of its morality. He is a fine poet."Derek Walcott.John Robert Lee is one of the group of significant Saint Lucian writers who are the younger contemporaries of Nobel laureate Derek Walcott.

Read more less

Lionel Froad is a Guyanese who works as a draftsman on an archeological survey in the mythical Jokhara in the horn of Africa. There he hopes to rediscover the self he calls 'Lobo', his alter ego from 'ancestral times', a 'pregnant load' he has carried with him 'waiting to be freed', which he thinks slumbers 'behind the cultivated mask' of Lionel. But Jokhara brings no magical re-immersion for 'Lionel looking for Lobo'. There are his complex relationships with other members of the team, his filial (and oedipal) relationship with Hughie, his white boss, and with Catherine, a Welsh girl on the team to whom Lionel finds himself passionately attracted, despite the disapproving inner voice of Lobo and Hughie's paternalistic interference. And at the points where communication breaks down with local Jokharans, Lionel/Lobo is forced to recognize what a breach the there has been in his New World psyche as a result of slavery and centuries of separation.With wit and above all with ruthless honesty in its exploration of the themes of identity and belonging, in Other Leopards, Denis Williams wrote one of the most important Caribbean novels of the past fifty years.Introduction by Victor Ramraj.Denis Williams was a highly accomplished artist, who also taught and published in the fields of West Indian and African art and anthropology, and, from 1974, was Director of Art and Archaeology with Guyana's Ministry of Education and Culture.

Read more less

This isn't a conventional book of academic essays, though these pieces on Caribbean, African, British and American poets are always scholarly and intellectually rigorous. They are particularly rewarding as the work of a practicing poet writing about those of his peers whose work he admires. There are essays on major Caribbean figures, on Walcott, Brathwaite and Martin Carter, and on the major African poets Niyi Osundare, Jack Mapanje and Femi Oyebode, but there are also pieces on less well-known poets such as Frank Collymore, Ian McDonald and James Berry that, without any agenda, bring to view work that ought to be taken far more seriously. As the editor of major anthologies of Caribbean poetry, Stewart Brown is more than usually aware of the new directions that Caribbean poetry has taken, and pieces on Olive Senior, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Kwame Dawes indicate some of these.How other societies are perceived has long been a preoccupation of Stewart Brown's own poetry and critical writing, and essays on the work of poets who have travelled frame this collection. Here he explores his own and other writers' work to make distinctions between the discourses of tourist, traveller and troublemaker.One subtext of the collection is a mistrust of the academic industry of postcolonial criticism. Here it is always the poem that matters (although the essays are alert to social, political and cultural contexts) and the emphasis is on close and sensitive reading rather than theory. A good many of these essays began as papers for oral delivery. One of their great pleasures is that they retain a flavour of the speaking voice: enthusiastic, generous and respectful of the presence of listeners, and now readers.Stewart Brown is the editor of several major anthologies as well as critical studies of Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite and Martin Carter.

Read more less

Rahim's stories move between the present and the past to make sense of the tensions between image and reality in contemporary Trinidad. The contemporary stories show the traditional, communal world in retreat before the forces of local and global capitalism. A popular local fisherman is gunned down when he challenges the closure of the beach for a private club catering to white visitors and the new elite; an Internet chat room becomes a rare safe place for AIDs sufferers to make contact; cocaine has become the scourge even of the rural communities. But the stories set thirty years earlier in the narrating 'I's' childhood reveal that the 'old-time' Trinidad was already breaking up. The old pieties about nature symbolised by belief in the presence of the folk-figure of 'Papa Bois' are powerless to prevent the ruthless plunder of the forests; communal stability has already been uprooted by the pulls towards emigration, and any sense that Trinidad was ever edenic is undermined by images of the destructive power of alcohol and the casual presence of paedophilic sexual abuse. Rahim's Trinidad, is though, as her final story makes clear, the creation of a writer who has chosen to stay, and she is highly conscious that her perspective is very different from those who have taken home away in a suitcase, or who visit once a year. Her Trinidad is 'not a world in my head like a fantasy', but the island that 'lives and moves in the bloodstream'. Her reflection on the nature of small island life is as fierce and perceptive as Jamaica Kincaid's 'A Small Place', but comes from and arrives at a quite opposite place. What Rahim finds in her island is a certain existential insouciance and the capacity of its people, whatever their material circumstance, to commit to life in the knowledge of its bitter-sweetness.

Read more less

A middle-aged man with a guilty taste for schoolgirls looks for a way to end his shame; a hotel receptionist begins a sexual adventure with shattering consequences; a young man is troubled by a persistent itch behind his shoulder-blades; a young African boy confronts his bullying class-mates in a surprising way; and a sculptor is asked to make a realistic life-size woman by a Japanese client. In these and the other stories in this collection, there is a delight in the dark, the grotesque, and the uncanny. In each of the stories, most of the characters are Black, and it both does and doesn't matter that this is so. As Courttia Newland's previous books have led us to expect, he is a meticulous, insightful observer of West London's Black communities, of their patterns of speech, fashions, their pleasures and the pressures of racism and exclusion they seek to escape. These are communities (and stories) in which crime, violence and drugs are part of the realities of life. But what is important here is not the sociology, but the form, in particular Courttia Newland's reinvigoration of the classic, popular short story form with its play with narrative twists and the unexpected. Drawing inspiration from everything from traditional horror movies to the contemporary sophistication of Japanese works in this genre, Newland brings together the literary and the popular in a uniquely Black British mix. In an afterword to these stories, Newland writes of his frustration with the narrow limits imposed by mainstream publishing expectations on Black British fiction, trapped between the immigrant 'Windrush' novel and the Yardie gangster novel with its American borrowings. "Music for the Off-Key" is distinctively British in its materials, black in a number of senses, and a thoroughly entertaining and sometimes shocking break-out from limiting expectations.

Read more less

The stories in this collection move the heart and the head. They are told by an old Jamaican woman about the community that has grown up around her, the village's first inhabitant. They concern the mystery that is men: men of beauty who are as lilies of the field, men who are afraid of and despise women, brutal men who prey on women, men who are searching for their feminine side, men who have lost themselves, men trapped in sexual and religious guilt. The seven stories are structured around the wise sayings, concerning the nature of judgment, divine, but mostly human, that she remembers as her grandfather's principle legacy to her. But the stories are far from illustrative tracts for the sayings - their starting points - but free-flowing narratives that explore all the complexity of life. Again, in focusing on men, the sociological truth of Jamaican life - that many men are absentee fathers; that many boys are brought up only by their mothers - is also only a starting point for a series of sensitive and imaginative explorations of the male psyche. Above all the collection is in love with telling stories - stories within stories, the reworkings of Jamaican folktales, tall tales and myths. There is a severity about the stories in the sense that actions and inactions have consequences that cannot be evaded, but there is always some possibility of change to be found by those who look for it. Jeremiah has been driven to a state of frozen, guilty isolation by the brutality his mother has visited on him as a vicarious punishment for the sins of his father. But even he comes to realise that 'He will not be his father. He will not be his mother. He will be himself despite the memories crowding in.' These are not judgmental stories by a woman about men. Responsibility is never only on one side. There is love and understanding for the characters in these stories - love that is tough, provocative and demanding of attention, but love none the less. As Jeremiah discovers, 'Allow thyself grace and blessings will follow.'

Read more less

"Impossible Flying" is Dawes' most personal and universal collection, 'telling family secrets to strangers'. There are moments of transcendence, but often there is 'no epiphany, just the dire cadence of regret' since the failures of the past cannot be undone, and there is no escape from human vulnerability, the disappointment of hopes, bodily decay and death. From that bleak acceptance comes a chastened consolation, and as for poems, 'they are fine and they always find a way to cope/they outlast everything, cynical to the last foot.' The family secrets focus primarily on the triangular relationship between the poet, his father and younger brother, though in "For Mama" there is a heartfelt and deeply moving acknowledgement of the rocklike unconditionality of a mother's love and care for her family's wounded souls. As ever with Dawes' collections, the rewards come not only from the individual poems, but also from their careful arrangement, internal conversations and from the overarching meanings that emerge from the architecture of the four sections. "Legend" begins the exploration of family mythology and the special place of the youngest brother and the hubristic hopes invested in him. "Estimated Prophet" gives context to the process of the brother's descent into madness and their father's collapse into despair and premature death in the condition of Jamaica in the 1980s when cold war politics and tribal wars brought an end to the dreams of the socialistic 70s, 'that valiant, austere decade'. Here the comic vision of the first section cannot be sustained in writing about 'those chaotic seven years of dust'. This section also deepens the counter-discourse of self-reflection on the act of writing the poems: the confessions of impersonation ('I have stolen much...') and the ambivalent space between history and myth in the filtering of memory and constructed family narratives. The third section, "Brother Love" is set in the present and deals with the renewal of relationship with the brother and the guilty respite of being away 'from the long lament', with marriage, children and 'the peace and constancy/of new homes, while old homes seem/to crumble about us.' The last section, "For My Little Brother" explores the difficult dialogue between these two worlds, between a past that is unalterable and a present that is shaped by it, but that contains its own possibilities. "Impossible Flying" is deeply felt writing that has an intensity and tautness which, if not new in Dawes' work, rises to new levels of eloquence. It is impossible to read this collection without feeling that one's consciousness of what it means to be human has been immeasurably deepened, or without wanting to constantly return to the poems.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

"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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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

Read more less

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.”

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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.

Read more less