Search results for ""Peepal Tree Press Ltd""

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.'

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"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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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When Manko arrives in Port of Spain from his country village to begin his divine mission, he discovers that he has the gift to touch the raw nerve of other people's needs, hopes and guilts. But when he becomes enmeshed in the lives of his fellow yard-dwellers without understanding the different crosses they bear, he sets in train events which teach him too late that there are temptations and responsibilities in being a servant of the Lord for which he is ill equipped. Khan portrays the tensions between authority and freedom, law and love in Trinidadian society through Manko's fate and the stories of the other yard dwellers. Told in two voices, one standard English, the other Creole, The Crucifixion is an ironic fable of a tragi-comic self-deception. In exploring the popular folk archetype of the self-crucified preacher, the novel takes the balladic form of the calypso to greater depths."A finely constructed and movingly told novel." Chris Searle, West Indian Digest"Students of Caribbean literature will certainly be delighted that after such a long hiatus another novel by this talented Trinidadian novelist is in print..." Daryl Dance, Journal of West Indian LiteratureIsmith Khan was born in Trinidad in 1925. He is the author of The Jumbie Bird and The Obeah Man. He lived in New York until his death in 2002.

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Continuing on from his outstanding collection of literary criticism, My Strangled City and other essays, literary critic and Professor Gordon Rohlehr delves further, examining the work of Sam Selvon, Louise Bennett, Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott and many other luminaries of the Caribbean. Originally published by Longman in 1992, this is a marvellous addition to the Caribbean Modern Classics series.

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Since 1969, Faustin Charles has been a significant voice in Caribbean poetry, and this long overdue selection from his previous collections and a book's worth of new poems offers readers a chance to enjoy the range and originality of his work. As a Trinidadian whose writing career has been spent in the UK, he is unquestionably a pioneer of the diasporic consciousness. In this respect his work has sought to uncover what is essential in the Caribbean cultural heritage, wherever Caribbean people might be, and from the time of his first collection, The Expatriate (1969) he has explored the experience of separation and the establishment of new connections. Here, though not ignoring the external contexts of racism and the marginalisation of immigrant communities, his work has focused on the inner qualities of that experience, speaking of those deeper psychic dislocations. As the Jamaican-born English poet Edward Lucie-Smith wrote: 'The "climate of the heart", which West Indians know of but cannot always communicate, speaks clearly and delicately in his work.' The range of Faustin Charles' poetry is wide. It has been very consciously modernist, not frightened of complexity or of embarking on journeys of discovery in ways that relate him to the radical fictions of Wilson Harris and Latin American magical realism. The connection between inner consciousness and landscape is a signal element in his writing. In this respect his work, originally published in the collections, Crab Track and Days and Nights in the Magic Forest is demanding but highly rewarding. But he has also written many eloquent and immediately accessible poems that celebrate manifold aspects of Caribbean culture: cricket, music, folklore and the fauna and flora of the region. Such poems have been seized on by any number of anthologists of Caribbean writing.In the new poems from Children of the Morning there is both a focus on the lives of the young, and a Blakean concern with the quality and integrity of childhood experience that clearly grows from his work as a storyteller with children. These are both songs of innocence and experience, of what ought to be, and, as in 'Stephen's Song', of a young life snuffed out by racism.Faustin Charles was born in Trinidad but has lived and published in London for most of his adult life. He is a poet, story-teller and very successful writer for children.

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Howard Fergus is amongst a very small minority of Montserratians. He lives in Montserrat. Emigration has taken generations away and the 1997 eruption of Soufrière destroyed two-thirds of its habitable space, its economy and drove the majority of its inhabitants into exile. The poems in Volcano Verses express the confidence that island life and folk will outlast volcanic tantrums, that though 'Tonight Chances pique still grows/...But cattle low and egrets ride/ Inspite of fire from mountain tides'. But what Fergus seems to be doing in the book is writing against the absences, writing into being again the people who have gone, the landscape utterly transformed, the society fragmented. The eruption has instigated the sternest truth-telling, the sense of a world purified, but it has also prompted a hugely heightened consciousness of the importance of the seemingly trivial, the myriad social interactions, the sounds, the smells of a literally vanished world. It is the very absences, the restriction of current possibility that drives Fergus to greater abundance of creation, in the conversational, muscular rhythms, the serious word-play that characterise his most mature and distinctive collection yet.Sir Howard Fergus was born in Montserrat. He is the author of three previous collections of poetry: Cotton Rhymes (1976), Green Innocence (1978) and Stop the Carnival (1980).

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