Search results for ""peepal tree press ltd""

The stories in Sic Transit Wagon bring together a rich, evocative and authentic tapestry of Trinidad life, from the 1940s to the present day. We move from the all-seeing naivety of a child narrator trying to make sense of the adult world, through the consciousness of the child-become-mother, to the mature perceptions of the older woman taking stock on all that has gone before.In the title story – a playful pun on the Latin phrase on the glory of worldly things coming to an end – the need to part with a beloved station wagon becomes a moving and humorous image for other kinds of loss.Barbara Jenkins was born in Trinidad. She studied at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, and at the University College, Cardiff. She married a fellow student, and they continued to live in Wales through the whole decade of the 1960s, before returning to Trinidad. Her stories have won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Caribbean Region) in 2010 and 2011, for 'Something for Nothing' and 'Head Not Made for Hat Alone' respectively; the Wasafiri New Writing Prize; the Canute Brodhurst Prize for short fiction from the Caribbean Writer; the Small Axe short story competition, 2011; and the Romance Category, My African Diaspora Short Story Contest.

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This classic reappears in an updated revision of the original short story set on a slave plantation.

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Raymond Ramcharitar is a writer, a journalist, and a cultural critic from Trinidad. He is the author of a controversial study of the Trinidadian media, "Breaking the News: Media and Culture in Trinidad," the short story collection "The Island Quintet," and the poetry collection "American Fall."

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Malika Booker is a British writer of Guyanese and Grenadian parentage. Her poems are widely published in anthologies and journals including, "Bittersweet: Contemporary Black Women's Poetry," "Black & Asian Poets," "Out of Bounds," ""and "Ten New Poets." She has represented British writing internationally, both independently and with the British Council, and has written for the stage and radio. She was the first Poet in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company and is the author of "Breadfruit."

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Velma Pollard is a writer, a researcher, and an educator from Jamaica. She is the author of several books, including" The Best Philosophers I Know Can't Read and Write," "Considering Woman I & II," "Crown Point and Other Poems," and "Shame Trees Don't Grow Here." She is also the recipient of the prestigious Casa de las Americas Prize for her novella "Karl."

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Personal heartbreak and public trauma are united in this haunting new collection from Seni Seneviratne. Her poems are both personal, enchanting lyrics of desire and political portrayals of life that has been marginalised, brutalised and lost. Each poem here catches a sadness, sometimes with the twist of a knife. Yet the sudden twists of anger and tragedy are cradled in compassion, acceptance and transcendence, and the overall effect is both compelling and soothing. The Heart of It is a tender, moving collection, full of passionate intensity and an unswerving faith in the power of reconciliation and love."These tender, moving poems weave a delicate web." – Jackie KaySeni Seneviratne was born and raised in Leeds, of English and Sri Lankan heritage. Her debut collection, Wild Cinnamon and Winter Skin, was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2007, and includes a poem which was Highly Commended by the judges in the Forward Poetry Prize. Her work was showcased in the groundbreaking Bloodaxe anthology Ten: New Poets from Spread the Word in 2010, championed by Carol Ann Duffy. Her poem 'Operation Cast Lead' was shortlisted in the 2010 Arvon International Poetry Competition. She has given readings, performances and workshops in the UK, the US, Canada, South Africa and Egypt.

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Shortlisted for the 2012 Forward Prize for Best First Collection.Loretta Collins Klobah sends us a twelve-foot woman with red neon surging through her veins, who boldly and gracefully takes on the challenges of urban life. Keen observer and witness, our warner woman turns her electric gaze to the everyday world and its extraordinary people. Against a soundtrack of world music, from salsa to reggae to jazz, and in a vibrant blend of English, Spanish and patois, she delivers by turns tender and incendiary hymns of homage to the Caribbean, American and British metropolis. Splendid, though endangered, nature and the spirit-world pervade the city, offering green-hearted hope for the future.Loretta Collins Klobah lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where she is a Professor of Caribbean Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Puerto Rico. She was one of eight poets featured in the anthology New Caribbean Poetry, edited by Kei Miller (Carcanet, 2007), and her poetry was also anthologised in the 1996 Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her poetry and scholarly essays have been published widely in the Caribbean, the UK and the US.

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When Crystal and Donald meet they are two modern, urban professionals, caught n the currents of life and fundamentally unsuited to one another, but bound by the one thing they have in common: powerful sexual desires. Marriage and four children later, Crystal and Donald are at a crossroads. Framed by the Yoruba belief system, the novel dances between the real-life drama that unfolds between Crystal and Donald and the spiritual fantasy world of the Orishas, where every human act has a spiritual ramification. Moving between California, Africa and the Caribbean, Painting Away Regrets is a compelling story of love, betrayal, madness and reconciliation."Solid, visceral, important... written with integrity and love."Alice Walker, author of The Color PurpleOpal Palmer Adisa was born in Jamaica, but has lived and worked in the US for almost forty years. She won a Pushcart Prize in 1987 for her short story 'Duppy Get Her'. She is the author of twelve books, including the poetry collections Caribbean Passion (2004) and I Name Me Name (2008), and the short-story collection Until Judgment Comes (2007); all three are published by Peepal Tree. More recently she co-edited the anthology Caribbean Erotic: Poetry, Prose and Essays with Donna Weir-Soley (Peepal Tree, 2010). She has taught at several universities including Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley. She is currently the editor of the Caribbean Writer.

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Red is a powerful new anthology of work by Black British poets. "Perhaps the most significant thing to be said about Red is that the poets in this volume burst through any constraining label with writing that throbs and pulses and seeps and flows." Margaret BusbyFeaturing: Jackie Kay * Patience Agbabi * Nii Ayikwei Parkes * Raman Mundair * Maya Chowdhry * Dorothea Smartt * Fred D’Aguiar * Linton Kwesi Johnson * Bernardine Evaristo * Roi Kwabena * John Lyons * Lemn Sissay * Grace Nichols * Jack Mapanje * Daljit Nagra * John Agard * Gemma Weekes * Wangui Wa Goro and many more...

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In this partly autobiographical novel, the death of Alphonso Tull heralds for his son, Ramsay, the beginning of a new Jamaica. His father has taught him 'always show respec' to white people, mi son. Is dem rule the world you know', but in post-Worldwar Jamaica, Black racial discontents and the desire for national independence are threatening the old colonial order. But for Ramsay, the first stage of his growth is a movement away from his people to the privileges of study at Oxford University, where there is immersion in European literary culture and Marxism. On his return to Jamaica, Ramsay becomes actively involved in radical nationalist politics, and begins his second journey, away from his middle-class origins and back to an involvement and true appreciation of the Jamaican people.On its original publication in 1960, The Last Enchantment was remarked on for its penetrating exploration of Jamaican racial politics. This quality is still fresh, but for contemporary readers what will shine from the novel is the sensuous apprehension of the Jamaican landscape and the language of the people.Neville Dawes was born in Nigeria in 1926 of Jamaican parents, but grew up in rural Sturge Town in Jamaica. He studied for an MA at Oxford (Oriel College) and later taught in Jamaica, Ghana and Guyana.

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Jacqueline Bishop is the founding editor of "Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts & Letters." She lives in New York City.

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A young man is killed in a traffic accident at a Welsh seaside resort of Caedmon. Drawing inspiration from the nouveau roman of Robbe-Grillet and Duras, Williams gives us the intensive reality of the scene through a small group of witnesses: inhabitants and visitors – and a ghostly revenant. One of these is Joss Banks, the retired English owner of a printing works. He is on a mission to placate his estranged wife, Bid, by recovering the artwork of her late first husband and his former employee. He, we learn, committed suicide when he discovers that Bid is carrying Banks's child. During the three hours of the novel's time-frame we are privy to a series of startling encounters involving Josh and the evidence of his bad conscience. Denis Williams lived for a time in North Wales – the subject also of his daughter Charlotte Williams's memoir Sugar and Slate – and here, in one of the most daringly experimental of Caribbean novels, he transposes his Guyanese concerns with power (the third temptation of Christ), the colonial relationship, passion, betrayal and guilt to the Welsh environment, bringing to it a vibrant Caribbean artist's eye.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.

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Shortlisted for the Guyana Prize Caribbean Award 2011.When Winston receives a telegram informing him of his father's imminent death, his decision to return to Jamaica is very reluctant. The memories opened up by his return tell us why. But twenty-five years in the USA without contact with his family has allowed mutual resentments to mature and trapped Winston in the traumas of his childhood. And when he discovers he has a half-sister no one has told him about, his fury knows no bounds. But it is Rosa, his father's outside child, who in the end offers Winston some focus for his feelings. Told through the perspectives of Winston and his estranged brother, Septimus, the novel becomes the story of their attempts to heal the breach between them, and become the kind of men who might be able to sustain a loving relationship.Powerful, absorbing, always moving and sometimes painfully funny, Patricia Powell's new novel seamlessly combines an intense psychological realism with magical elements that are no surprise to her characters, but will surprise and delight her readers. Tough and unsentimental as it is, the novel has much to say about the power of forgiveness and the possibility of transcending hurt.Patricia Powell was born in Jamaica. She is the award winning author of three novels including A Small Gathering of Bones and The Pagoda. She is currently Associate Professor of English at Mills College in California.

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The novel returns to the aftermath of the trial of Beatrice Salandy and the villagers of Rosehill on the island of Santabella first met in Flanagan's novel You Alone Are Dancing. Though Beatrice is acquitted to the joy of the village, it is clear that nothing has changed. Though Santabella has been independent for several decades, only the new Black ruling class has benefited. Most Santabellans struggle to scratch a living, find adequate schools, healthcare or even reliable basic services. Cynical corruption flourishes and the queues to get visas to escape to America grow ever longer and more desperate. For Beatrice there is the recognition that Sonny, the man she loved, has wholly abandoned her, settled in the USA with a white American wife.But there is one new element: a rapidly growing radical Muslim movement with a growing appeal to the poor Black people of Santabella with their welfare schemes, grass-roots campaigning and air of incorruptibility. And there is the Haji, the charismatic leader of movement who combines a media-savvy native wit, a well-developed mystique and a steely control over his group. Even Beatrice is impressed. Between the Mosque, regularly raided for arms by the police and army and Rosehill is Abdul, whose aunt lives in the village and who is the Haji's second in command. It is Abdul, decent serious Abdul, who is one of the main narrative voices in the novel. But does his sincerity go with honesty about the violent coup that the Haji plans? Abdul's becomes a fascinatingly unreliable voice, part revealer, part concealer of the truth.Trinidad born Brenda Flanagan teaches creative writing, Caribbean and African American Literatures at Davidson College, North Carolina. She is also a United States cultural ambassador, and has served in Kazakstan, Chad and Panama.

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New Day is set on the eve of the achievement of universal adult suffrage in Jamaica in 1944 and the rise of the mass political parties of the nationalist movement. It is told through the memories of John Campbell, an old man whose memories go back to the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865, when after years of drought and repression a peasant rebellion lead by a Baptist Deacon Paul Bogle briefly flared and was then put down with the utmost savagery, including the slaughter of some of Campbell's family. In the present, Garth Campbell, John's grand nephew, is a leader of the nationalist and trade union movement, a lawyer who, unlike his father, has never lost touch with the people and is a keen listener to the history his great uncle tells him must inform his actions. The Campbell family are brown Jamaicans, successful business people and committed to peaceful, constitutional ways to progress.In part, the dynamics of Reid's novel arise from the conflict between this desire and the reality that Jamaica is prone to outbreaks of violence, in the present as well as the past, because the rulers are indifferent to the vast swells of anger always ready to surface in the under-educated, impoverished, spontaneous Black majority impatient for change and social justice. New Day is pioneering in its attempt to create a literary language of narration out of a modified version of Jamaican nation-language.

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Dorothea Smartt connects past and present, presence and absence in this rich new collection of poems. At its heart is a sequence of poems set in Lancaster that excavate the missing history of Samboo, an African slave brought from the Caribbean by a Lancaster sea-captain as a present for his wife. Samboo died within days of his arrival and is presumed buried at Sunderland Point. The sequence both imagines Samboo's mostly unrecorded experience and draws connections between present day Lancaster and the foundations of its 18th century prosperity in slave trading. Begun as a commission by Lancaster Litfest, the sequence is a deeply personal response to the bicentenary of the abolition of British slave trading. It is accompanied by photographs which place Samboo's tragedy in the Lancaster landscape.Surrounding this sequence are contemporary poems that, on one level, in the vitality of lives revealed, provide a counterpoint to the emptiness of Samboo's too soon curtailed life, but on another level echo a continuity of loss wrought by the fragmentation of African Caribbean families through continuing migrations and death.The need to imagine who Samboo might have been, to tell his missing story and see through the false identity that others imposed on him connects to a more personal, contemporary sense of obligation in Dorothea Smartt's work. This is the duty to record family history, to envision a wholeness out of the fragments and dissolve the differences that prejudice may interpose between private and public selves.Dorothea Smartt, born and raised in London, is of Barbadian heritage. Described as 'accessible and dynamic', her poetry appears in several journals and ground-breaking anthologies.

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Stewart Brown and Ian McDonald present a multi-faceted portrait of the significance of cricket to the Caribbean and the attraction of Caribbean cricket to the outside world. With poems, calypsos, stories, extracts from novels, essays, speeches and articles, the editors show cricket inhabiting all areas of the Caribbean imagination. From its expression at the highest level on the global field of play, to the no less titanic struggles on the bumpier fields of the village or the sugar estate, this is a celebration of those who forged an art out of a game, those who transformed a colonial sport into the cutting edge of Caribbean nationalism, and, in the 1970s and 80s changed forever the nature of the game."The Bowling Was Superfine is a gem. So purely cut, it sends light sparkling off in a hundred, different directions."ESPN CricInfoStewart Brown has edited several anthologies of Caribbean writing, including The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry (with Ian McDonald, 1992) and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories (2009). He also edited The Art of Derek Walcott (Seren, 1995) and All are Involved: The Art of Martin Carter (Peepal Tree, 2000). Ian McDonald is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has served as a judge for the Guyana Prize for Literature. He is the author of the 1969 novel The Hummingbird Tree (2004), which was recently made into a BBC film, four collections of poetry and a play.

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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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Yvonne Weekes' memoir of eight years dominated by the awakening, eruption and still grumbling aftermath of Montserrat's Soufriere is a remarkable document at many levels. It is an acutely written account of the impact of the eruption on the life and viability of this small Caribbean island, with a quizzical eye for the undertones of the experience - the way, for instance, the awakened mountain becomes a favoured place for car-bourne lovers' trysts - as well as for the more public manifestations of the way her people responded to disaster. As Director of Culture who organised a theatrical review that was taken round the refugees in the temporary shelters, she was well-placed to observe and listen; one of the qualities of the book is the way it brings the voices of Montserratians so vividly to life. She captures a world split between the new scientific vocabulary of seismology and pyroclastic flows and the Old Testament talk of Sodom and Gomorrah and sins punished. But 'Volcano' is above all a personal and intimate account of the processes of stress, loss, grieving emptiness and the rebuilding of heart and sense of self; of confronting the 'nothingness that hollows me', when everything by which she has known herself - home, family, friends, landscape - is taken from her, when faith is tested to the core. But it is the quality of Yvonne Weekes' writing that makes 'Volcano' a work of art as well as a record. Her prose is always alive, conversational and clear, rising to memorable heights when she describes the terrible moments of blackness against which all life demands to be reviewed.

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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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The poems in Curry Flavour will grab you with their exuberant recreation of the dramas of an intensely experienced inner life. Their imagery is sensuous, drawn from, among other sources, the flora and fauna of the Caribbean landscape. Their voice is erotic, humorous, subversive, prayerful, angry, revolutionary and celebratory.Inspired by the all-embracing nature of the Hindu Gods, these poems attack biases and false polarities of all kinds, not least between stereotypes of gender, the sexual and the spiritual and the personal and the political. They express a New World, pan-Caribbean consciousness which is rooted in a womanist revisioning of her Indian ancestral heritage and a childhood and youth spent on the sugar-growing Caroni plains of Trinidad.With the ceremonial incense of prayer, the ripe mango-syrup of erotic celebration, the pungency of wild coriander and shadon beni of the Creole folkworld, this is a feast for all the senses, blended together but keeping fresh all their individual piquancy, accompanied by the sound of tassa and steelband, simmered over a fire that burns away the jumbies of homophobia, incest, violence and racial hatred."It's not very often that a debut collection of poems can entertain, instruct and enlighten, yet Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming's Curry Flavour does this with confidence and wit..."Geoffrey Philp, The Caribbean WriterLelawattee Manoo-Rahming was born in Trinidad in 1960. A mechanical/building services engineer and part-time college lecturer, she now lives in Nassau, Bahamas.

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We have always valued the short story as a way to make sense of the world, and our place in it. This anthology by leading Black and Asian British writers is filled with stories, which, like life, rarely end in the way we might expect... JACOB ROSS, KADIJA SESAY, SENI SENEVIRATNE, LEONE ROSS, DESIREE REYNOLDS, SAI MURRAY, RAMAN MUNDAIR, BERNARDINE EVARISTO, MONICA ALI, DINESH ALLIRAJAH, MULI AMAYE, LYNNE E. BLACKWOOD, JUDITH BRYAN, JACQUELINE CLARKE, JACQUELINE CROOKS, FRED D'AGUIAR, SYLVIA DICKINSON, GAYLENE GOULD, MICHELLE INNISS, VALDA JACKSON, PETE KALU, PATRICE LAWRENCE, JENNIFER NANSUBUGA MAKUMBI, TARIQ MEHMOOD, CHANTAL OAKES, KAREN ONOJAIFE, KOYE OYEDEJI, LOUISA ADJOA PARKER, HANA RIAZ, AKILA RICHARDS, AYESHA SIDDIQI, MAHSUDA SNAITH

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Mark Lattimer is chopped by a stranger in the heat of a riot. He has been attacked because he looks white and middle class, though he is a politically committed lawyer working for the poor and the nationalist movement in Jamaica. Now he is trapped, brought to bleed his life away in a small, airless room, cut off from doctors, ambulances, police. As he dies, he talks to his companions, his black lover and a fellow party worker, and drifts into memories of his past: his privileged childhood, his time in London and the RAF, his affairs and marriage and the moment when he gives his allegiance to the poor. But now what meaning can be given to his life and death? First published fifty years ago, "Voices Under the Window" is reissued in association with the Calabash International Literary Festival Trust as a work that, in the words of Colin Channer, is a 'Molotov cocktail that ignites important questions of race and power ...questions still burning in Kingston today.' In his insightful introduction, Kwame Dawes finds in "Voices", a novel that is wholly contemporary in its treatment of the personal and the political, that lives because it is a 'deftly crafted work full of a sense of place and time, a work of psychological intensity and literary elegance.'

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'... here in the shadow of the Connors Sardine FactoryShe spawns her progeny of air and dies.'The juxtaposition of images of the salmon's sordid entrapment on a Canadian factory farm, images of its spiritual fulfilment (or nullity) and the tensions between its instincts for freedom and return offer a concentrated motif for this remarkable collection. In making his own return of memory from Canada and South Carolina to a childhood and youth in 1970s Jamaica (in particular as a student of Jamaica College), Kwame Dawes' poems display a powerful narrative thrust, an appealing sense of humour, a gift for characterisation and an acute sense of time and place.Winner of the prize for the best first collection in the Forward Poetry Prize of 1994, Progeny of Air links inner personal experience and social and historical perspectives to mutually enriching effect. "Progeny of Air takes its title from a single poem describing a fishing trip, referring to the life cycle of the salmon, both actual and hypothetical. This also neatly reflects the themes and concerns of the collection: movement and the impulse of natural energy; the need to go back and revisit meaningful times and places in one's life; a way of living an authentic life, the possibility of growth and self-awareness. The leap and dash of the salmon is also caught in the poetry's musical rhythms and striking language. I am grateful to Kwame Dawes for writing this book and bringing some heat to a grey and chilly autumn. Peepal Tree are bringing out two further books, I look forward to seeing what else this man can do."Linda France, Poetry Review.Kwame Dawes is widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of the post-Walcott generation. He currently holds the position of Distinguished Poet In Residence and Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina.

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Why does the Judge, a powerful, wealthy man bring his world crashing down by murdering his son, Baby-Boy? What is the Beggarman up to when he is seen walking away from the Judge's house with Baby Boy on the day of the murder? Why does Blanche Steadman, servant in the Judge's house, so fear the Beggarman's presence? What is the significance of the dress of feathers that flames and burns in the eyes of anyone who sees it? How does all this relate to the tragic death of the Judge's first wife, who was born with caul over her eyes, the witness bearer, the prophetic conscience of both the present and the past?At the heart of the narrative is Blanche Steadman. She is at first the traumatised sufferer of her own life-shattering tragedy and unwitting observer of the pain locked deep in the secrets of the Judge's house. But through her reading of the Caul girl's diaries, her closeness to the questioning, rebellious Baby-Boy, and her friendship with the market woman, Irene Gittings (who is far from what she first seems) she comes to an understanding both of her own capacities and the hidden forces at work in her world. But it is not until the very last chapter that the whole story emerges, and until that point the reader is engaged in a journey of discovery as complex and surprising as life itself. As Irene Gittings old mother says: 'Open yuh yie, yuh sah gat sense', implying that mostly we pay the consequences of going around with our eyes closed.Set in Guyana, In Remembrance of Her is full of unforgettable characters like Disguile with his dreams of a new empire ruled by Black men, Irene Gittings who succumbs to the dreadful temptation to change the course of the Caul girl's life, cross-dressing Baby-Boy with his white painted face, and Blanche Steadman, who with her enlarging vision becomes a warmly sympathetic guide for the reader to the unfolding mysteries of the story. What emerges, beyond the individual tragedies, is the picture of a wilfully amnesiac society that shuts its eyes and ears to past and present suffering. What Harris's gothic, richly poetic novel shows is the need for a new compassion if the restless dead are to find release and cruelty, pain, guilt and retribution are not to be endlessly recycled.Denise Harris was born in Guyana, the daughter of the novelist Wilson Harris. She works for UNICEF in New York. She is also a photographer.

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