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Jason Lumley is in a Miami bar when he sees a newsflash reporting the murder of his politician father, Albert Lumley. With his girlfriend, Nicole, Jason returns to his native Jamaica for the funeral. There the murder is regarded by all as part of the bipartisan warfare which has torn the country apart.But when Jason meets his old mentor, Papa Legba, the Rastafarian hints at a darker truth. Under the guidance of his locksman Virgil, and redeemed by his love for the Beatrice-like figure of Nicole, Jason enters the several circles of Jamaica's hell. The portrayal of the garrison ghetto area of Standpipe is, in particular, profoundly disturbing.In his infernal journeyings, Jason encounters both former acquaintances and earlier versions of himself. In the process he confronts conflicting claims on his identity: the Jason shaped by the middle-class colonial traditions of Jamaica College and the Benjamin who was once close to Papa Legba. Benjamin, My Son combines the excitement of the fast-paced thriller, the literary satisfactions of its intertextual play and the bracing commentary of its portrayal of the sexism, homophobia and moral corruption which have filled the vacuum vacated by the collapse of the nationalist dream.Geoffrey Philp was born in Jamaica. He now lives and works in Miami.

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Between the title poem and other poems in the collection, Michael Gilkes sets up a dialogue about memory and experience through time. Joanstown celebrates, in the voice of both younger and older selves, the interweaving of a loved woman and a place. The elegant Georgetown of the 1940s, with its 'cross-stitching of avenues, bridges, canals' is transfigured by the presence of the beloved as she becomes the city's embodiment. The very concreteness of the recreation of a time when happiness came so easily, and of the genesis of a marriage whose seeming perfection leads to hubris, is made the more moving for the reader by the framing awareness of its evanescence.But there are other frames that transform the experience of loss into the consolations of art. In exploring the ancient hinterland of metamorphosis behind metaphor, Gilkes puts change at the heart of life. There is the transformation by love's fire of the lumpen boy, the class clown, 'a quasi-Quasimodo humped over a wooden desk', into the transfigured bridegroom whose 'body... floated towards the organ loft', or of the town's zinc roofs which 'curled like leaves' over the burning city, or of Joanstown's innocence inverted in the horror of Jonestown: 'carnage in paradise'. Another frame uses the base elements. In Guyana, fire and flood represent a constant cycle of destruction and renewal. This offers a rich source of visual metaphor but also brings to the poems a sense of time beyond the linearity of loss. The mud, rivers and rainforest of Guyana give birth, for instance, to the iridescent imagination of Wilson Harris, the 'steersman' whose example Gilkes so gracefully acknowledges.There are poems of lyric grace, intellectual playfulness and ironic wit; poems where Gilkes brings a painter's eye to his descriptions of both urban Guyana and its rainforests. Carefully sculpted sonnets, dramatic monologues, a pithy Creole letter and a calypso narrative show the range of Gilkes' voice, revealing him to be not only one of the Caribbean's most distinguished critics and dramatists, but a poet of major accomplishment. Joanstown won the 2002 Guyana Prize as the best collection of poetry.Michael Gilkes was born in Guyana in 1933 and left in 1961, but has never strayed far from Guyana and the Caribbean. He is one of the region's foremost literary critics and playwrights, as well as an actor, director, film-maker and university lecturer.

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Eve has to watch her husband bring his paler mistress to the party she has so carefully prepared; Esther to deal with her rebellious daughter, and the guilt which attaches to her own youthful revolt against racial oppression; Joelle and Maryse must find ways of dealing with the incomprehension between village Africa and chic Frenchness in their Ivoirean lives; Gambian Doudou wants a traditional wife to end his loneliness in London; and Julia, in the title story, must fight to find herself again when her oldest friend dies of cancer.Whether living in Bermuda, America, London, the Gambia or the Cote d'Ivoire, the characters in these stories not only confront their individual traumas, but the ways in which, as people of the African diaspora, differences of colour, class and colonial heritage divide them both from each other and themselves. We are given revealing insights into Bermudian society, its tensions of race and culture and the geography that pulls some of its people closer to the USA, while others look to links with the Caribbean or the even more submerged links with Africa. But if we see the pain and alienation of uprooted people, what also moves through the stories is a sense of identity not as something fixed, but as an Atlantic flow, a circuit of peoples and cultures which has Africa as one of its starting points. And in that lies a unity that is real, if submarine.When Doudou listens to the Gambian music of his homeland in London, it is a music of multiple Atlantic crossings, powerfully influenced by Cuban rumba, itself born from African and European roots. And as Mame Koumba, pointing to his Black British grandchildren, tells Doudou, grieving for the loss of ancestral wholeness, 'They're not what you would have had in the Gambia. But they're what you have. And there's Africa in them all.' Angela Barry's stories demand an alertness to that kind of connection.Angela Barry lives and works in Bermuda. Her writing has been published in The Massachusetts Review and she is the recipient of a James Michener Creative Writing Fellowship.

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Fear and bitterness pollute the ground from which the characters of these stories, mostly young and female, struggle to grow. With so many 'bad seeds', mostly male, taking root around them, with sexual violence, neglectful and brutal fathers, jealousy, lies and prejudice obscuring their light, their blossoming is always under threat. But in these diverse, subtly constructed stories, there is often a glimmer of hope: in a girl's tentative resistance to general prejudice about 'madmen'; or in the silence on a phone line between estranged friends, where forgiveness may or may not come. In the stories set in Jamaica life is hard, and the comforts of 'away' are idealized. But in the cold of the streets of the North, there is no passport to success for the people of yard. Only their resilience, optimism, humour and friendship (and the comforts of beer and ganja) help them make their way. And in the 'diaspora dance' of the different immigrant nations struggling to find their place in Europe or North America, new connections and new possibilities are being created. But if these stories are coolly unsentimental, there is also room for humour and moments of joy, as when Marie, a middle-aged Jamaican reggae singer, finds the sweet flavour of cane juice lingering on her young Brazilian lover's tongue.Alecia McKenzie was born and grew up in Kingston, Jamaica. Her short stories, Satellite City, won the Commonwealth Writers regional prize for the best first work in 1993.

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From 1955 onwards, when the anti-colonial movement split into competing ethnic sections, conflict between African and Indian Guyanese has held Guyana in a deadlock which has undermined all attempts at social and economic development. At its height exploding into civil war in the 1960s, the constant state of tension has led to rigged elections, authoritarian government, economic collapse and driven hundreds of thousands of Guyanese to emigrate. Even in the present, when for the first time for decades, free and fair elections can be held, winning and losing further divides the nation.Judaman Seecoomar's book offers an analysis of how Guyana has arrived at this impasse and suggests a process that could lead out of it. He identifies a history of authoritarian government where those who control the state (whether colonial governments in the past, those who seized power through rigged elections, or those who gained it by virtue of having the support of the ethnic majority), have responded to Guyana's cultural pluralism by suppressing or ignoring the interests of the minority. He argues that the failure to satisfy the human needs of all Guyana's ethnic groups is the root cause of conflict and only their satisfaction offers a means of harnessing all the nation's energies for development. He identifies the crucial needs as being those that relate to security, the recognition of cultural identity, participation in decision-making and the fair distribution of social rewards.The book looks to the developing practice of conflict resolution through strategies of collaborative problem solving. It argues that such a process would offer Guyana the means of finding constitutional and institutional arrangements acceptable to all ethnic groups. It provides both an account of the theoretical frameworks for such an approach and case studies of conflict resolution in action in Northern Ireland and in the Oslo talks between Israelis and Palestinians. It documents the initial attempts by the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to broker talks between the main Guyanese political parties.In a world where internal conflict in multi-ethnic states is the major source of regional instability, this is a timely book.Judaman Seecoomar was born July 15 1932; he died March 26 2006. He had recently completed a PhD on inter-racial conflict in Guyana.

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In the Xango ceremony, the contraries of New World African experience find transcendence. From the established, bodily patterns of ritual comes release into the freedom of the spirit; from the exposure of pain comes the possibilities of healing; and for the individual there is both the dread aloneness with the gods and the 'we-ness' of community.Simultaneously the rites celebrate the rich, syncretic diversity, the multiple connections of the African person in the New World and enact the tragic search for the wholeness of the lost African centre. And there is the god himself, standing at the crossroads, 'beating iron into the shape of thunder', both the prophetic voice warning of the fire to command the creator who hammers out sweet sound from the iron drum.Geoffrey Philp finds in Xango a powerful metaphor that is both particular to the Caribbean and universal in its relevance. If his first collection, Florida Bound, was characterised by the exile's bittersweet elegies of regret, and the second, Hurricane Center, stared edgily into the dark heart of a threatening world, Xango Music brings a new sinewy toughness of line to an ever deepening vision of the dynamic polarities of human existence."Using rhythm and riffs, he can pull the stops on language and give it a high energy kick. In 'jam-rock' he winds up with 'the crack of bones, the sweat of the whip; girl, you gonna get a lot of it; get it galore; my heart still beats uncha, uncha uncha, cha'(31).David and Phyllis Gershator, The Caribbean Writer. Philp successfully uses a variety of traditional forms, including the sestina - not an easy form to master but masterfully handled in 'sestina for bob.' Eclectic, the poet pays homage to Kamau Brathwaite, Bob Marley, and Derek Walcott.Geoffrey Philp was born in Jamaica. He now lives and works in Miami.

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Madrassis in Guyana used to pour a drop of white rum in memory of their ancestors. Moses Nagamootoo's libation is, like the best high wine, an intoxicating mix of fire, sweetness and pungency. Blending fiction and documentary, he reanimates a world now mostly gone, that of the Madrassi fishermen, market-traders, rice farmers, Kali worshippers, cricketers, turfites and see-far practitioners who inhabited the Corentyne village of Whim in the 1950s and 60s.Though only a small percentage of the quarter million Indians who came to Guyana, the South Indian Madrassis, now much dispersed through emigration to North America, played an influential role in Guyanese life. The Kali-Mai churches they established, for instance, now draw devotees from all Guyanese ethnic groups.At the heart of the narrative are the stories of the entrepreneurial Naga, like pot-salt in everything, his wife Chunoo, resolute in her sense of community and justice, and Hendree, Naga's sidekick, an idler, brilliant drummer and would-be healer. In their lives are played out the polarities which gave Madrassi life its extraordinary dynamism: its spirituality and earthiness, its respect for goodness - and delight in scampishness, its faithfulness to Madrassi culture and openness to the culture of others, particularly the Afro-Guyanese.What is to be savoured above all in this book is its language, particularly when we hear the Whim villagers and the pungent and elegant Creole through which they represented their world and maintained their place in it.Moses Nagamootoo was born in Whim Village. Since 1992 he has been member of the Guyanese Parliament and for a time held the portfolio of Minister of Information.

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Acknowledging an inheritance fostered in the seed-bed of Guyana, land of six peoples and transitional territory between the Caribbean and Amerindian South America, Andrew Jefferson-Miles's Art of Navigation comprises three poems exploring the community of man and his expeditions in imagination and reality. Legend, myth, and intuition find equal footing with Heidegger, quantum physics and qualitative theory. 'Art of Navigation', the title poem, is the dreaming and redreaming of potent new frameworks for history. It follows, through different histories, man's ongoing search for an undiscovered continent. Two currents in the poem meet and merge: one, official, like the chain of events which constitute a written history; the other to be found in those overlooked links which slip away, tantalizingly, to resettle in the seed-bed of the culture. 'Sestina of Sestina's' explores the echoes of landscape between Wales and the poet's remembered Guyana in ways which tap Jefferson-Miles's sense of his cross-cultural inheritance, whilst 'Malory' transplants Gwendolyn and Myrddin (Merlin) from an ancient Celtic myth (which has resonances with Amerindian myth) into the twentieth century, and travel by train, writing a new text for an ancient fragment to position the reader in a new configuration with the world.Andrew Jefferson-Miles is a poet and artist.

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From the vantage point of later middle life, Ian McDonald's collection looks into the heart of time passing: the coming death of ageing parents, the old men, the 'archive' of a disappearing Guyana who die one by one, the sight of 'my own lines of age' and the loss of pleasure in the glittering carnival of the senses. There are rich blessings of the arrival of a new child coming unexpected at this stage of life; and the consolations from books and in the power of art to preserve - at least for a time. But the very joys are made more piquant by the inescapable sense of the transitoriness of all things.Poems of moving domestic intimacy and humour ('To alarm their father's half to death / New-born babies hold their breath'), valedictory requiems for the characters who have given Georgetown life its flavour and regret for the country's loss of civility during its darkest recent years and songs in praise of nature are all part of a vision which looks into the darkness but says, 'Yes, it is as you say, / But let us get just one thing straight: / There is beauty in the world / ... And the star-tree blossoms in the night, / Night that will have an end' and asserts, 'Between silence and silence, there should be only praise.'Ian McDonald is Trinidadian by birth and Guyanese by long residence and adoption. He is the author of the recently filmed The Hummingbird Tree, four collections of poetry and a play. He edits Kyk-over-Al.

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Stewart Brown has been described as "one of the most exciting and original poets currently writing" and praised by Fred D'Aguiar for the "peculiar chameleon-like power of his imagination to belong anywhere and to any experience without becoming compromised". The poems in this collection encompass Africa, the Caribbean, Wales and England; and range from the sweep of imperial history and its painful aftermath, to the intimacies of domestic life. He writes of Africa and the Caribbean with a rare combination of sympathy, honesty and inwardness, while never pretending to be other than an Englishman abroad. He writes affectionately but without sentiment of 'ordinary' English life from the perspective of one who has been elsewhere, in ways which allow us to see it afresh.But if these poems have a passionate concern with love, politics, history and the natural world, they are no less concerned with the shaping power of art, both as a subject and in the poems' own formation.Elsewhere brings together, frequently in much revised form, the best work from his earlier much praised collections (Mekin Foolishness, Zinder and Lugard's Bridge) with many new poems. The long sequence 'Elsewhere', which brings Brown's painterly eye and witty humanity to the experience of living in the Caribbean, and 'Elmina', a moving and imaginative meditation on an Englishman's sense of complicity in the history of the slave trade, will further enhance his reputation.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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A vivid cast of characters throng these poems. There is Mother Jackson, the ole hige who lays out her thoughts like a mortician, who is both creator and destroyer. There are the players of the Rootsman Theatre of the Absurd, such as fallen politician Julian Lapith, who knows too well the power of incantation; Dub Deacon Lapith with his Sankey soul; poor Bedward Lapith with his millenarian dreams of flight; Busha Godhead self swoopsing down to intervene in human affairs and - the heroine of the cast - Aliveyah, to whom nature speaks direct by the nudge of a beak.And there is, of course, their creator, Miss G.E., who shares with us the 'rockstone passion of a Jamaican country bumpkin born and nurtured in Arcadia'. Whether in her celebrations of domestic happiness in a house where even the chairs talk, or in her satires on Jamaican life, Gloria Escoffery writes with a visionary intensity and fantastical imagination which is all her own. And though she feels it is no joke to be three people - old woman, young girl and child - who don't quite understand one another, Miss G.E. cannot but write her love letter to the world.[b]Gloria Escoffery[/b] was born in 1923. She has worked as a teacher, written extensively on Jamaican art and is one of her country's finest painters.

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In 1765, Mirza Sheikh I'tesamuddin, a Bengali munchi employed by the East India Company, travelled on a mission to Britain to seek protection for the Mogul Emperor Shah Alam II. The mission was aborted by the greed and duplicity of Robert Clive, but it resulted in this remarkable account of the Mirza's travels in Britain and Europe.Written in Persian, 'Shigurf Nama-e-Vilayet' or 'Wonderful Tales about Europe' is an entertaining, unique and culturally valuable document. The Mirza was in no sense a colonial subject, and whilst he wrote frankly about what he felt accounted for India's decline and Europe's contemporary ascendance, he was a highly educated, culturally self-confident observer with a sharp and quizzical curiosity about the alien cultures he encountered. His accounts of visits to the theatre, the circus, freakshows, the 'mardrassah of Oxford', Scotland, of the racial alarms his presence sometimes provoked and of his impressions of British moral codes (including the 'filthy habits of the firinghees') make for fascinating reading.There is, too, embedded in the narrative, a touching and cautionary account of the Mirza's relationship with Captain Swinton, with whom he travelled from India and who was his regular companion in Britain. Swinton was evidently kindly and generous, but by the end of the Mirza's stay, the friendship has broken down, chiefly over Swinton's refusal to take the Mirza's Islamic faith and cultural identity seriously.Kaiser Haq's scholarly, modern translation is the first to appear in English since the original 'abridged and flawed translation' which appeared in 1827. The Wonders of Vilayet is an important document, a salutary addition to Western accounts of the 'Otherness' of India, orientalism in reverse.Kaiser Haq was born in what later became Bangladesh, for the creation of which he fought as an officer in the war of liberation. He is a poet and translator and is currently Professor of English at Dhaka University.

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This is an anthology to delight both lovers of reggae and lovers of poetry which sings light as a feather, heavy as lead over the bedrock of drum and bass. If in the past Caribbean poetry seemed split between the English literary tradition and the oral performance of dub poetry, Wheel and Come Again brings together work which combines reggae's emotional immediacy, prophetic vision, fire and brimstone protest and sensuous eroticism with all the traditional resources of poetry: verbal inventiveness, richness of metaphor and craft in the handling of patterns of rhythm, sound and poetic structure.Its range is as wide as reggae itself. There are poems celebrating, and sometimes mourning, the lives and art of such creative geniuses as Don Drummond, Count Ossie, Lee 'Scratch' Perry, Bob Marley, Big Youth, Bunny Wailer, Winston Rodney, Patra and Garnett Silk. There are poems of apocalyptic vision, fantasy, humour and storytelling; poems about history, culture, politics, religion, art, human relationships and love; poems which employ standard Caribbean English, poems written in Jamaican nation language and many poems which move easily between the two.From its birth in the ghettos of Kingston, reggae has become an international musical language, and whilst Jamaicans are inevitably well represented in this anthology, Wheel and Come Again reflects reggae's universal appeal with contributors from the USA, Canada, Britain, Guyana and St. Lucia. What all have found in reggae is an art with a rich aesthetic which, like the poetry they aspire to write, speaks to the body, mind and spirit, which compels a state of heightened expectancy with its combination of pattern and surprise: 'Counting out the unspoken pulse/ then wheel and come again'."Wheel and Come Again is no academic treatise - it is an attempt to hold a dancehall session in poetry, to take readers to the heart of reggae and carry them into the compelling seduction of the drum and bass' (26). This bold assertion, made in the introduction of Dawes's latest work, Wheel and Come Again, could have also added the word 'celebration'. And there is a lot to celebrate in this anthology"Geoffrey Philp, The Caribbean Writer.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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The View from Belmont tells two stories: one through the letters of a young English widow who takes over her husband's cocoa estate in Trinidad in 1823; the other through the responses of a group of contemporary Trinidadians who are reading the letters at the time of the 1990 Muslimeen attempted coup. Clara's letters present the insights of a perceptive, independent-minded and generous-spirited young woman, who is nevertheless wholly committed to the institution of slavery. The letters give a sharp sense of Trinidadian society in the process of formation, but at their heart is an account of Clara's relationships with those with whom she shares her life on the estate, in particular Kano, a 'loyal' slave who she takes to her bed. For the contemporary Trinidadians, the letters raise troubling questions about the nature of the national psyche, the absence of social consensus and the extent to which the history of that period still shapes the present. Is Clara a 'worthless white bitch - no different from any of them men who was screwing their slave women' or a sensible woman taking charge of her life and looking for companionship? This is a comic, painful and moving novel. Its presentation of the cruelties, violence and affections of everyday relations under slavery raise questions not only about the nature of Caribbean societies, but the nature of history and its interpretation.Novelist and poet Kevyn Arthur was born in Barbados in 1942. He has worked as a journalist and as a philosophy lecturer, and currently lives in Virginia.

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Disparate worlds collide in Williams's two novellas. In My Planet of Ras a young German woman joins a Rastafarian commune in Jamaica. Under the guidance of Selassie, reader and healer with herbs, Ikael, artist-painter, and Kilmanjaro, master drummer, and under the healing influence of 'the herb of nations' she learns to marvel, and to understand the true nature of community ('You and I talking, one and one - that is community! Hardest thing to build these days. Not enough empty reflecting silence, like mortar, to build with'). Williams' portrayal of the rootedness, the inner calm and visionary enlightment of the group is movingly convincing, not least because the novella realistically conveys the group's vulnerability, temptations and the costs of their denials. In their rejection of materialism and competition, they indeed have to live as if they are on another planet, constantly threatened by the surrounding Babylon.What Happening There, Prash, is a contrary and equally convincing portrayal of the magnetic pull of North America and its offer of the possibilities of individual recognition, competitive edge and material success. Prash and his wife Sookmoon abandon the decaying 'socialist' republic of Guyana for New York and for Sookmoon, at least, there is the chance, eagerly seized, to remake her life as a liberated woman. But when Prash gets mixed up in some serious drugs business, he discovers that the freedom of the market has its price.N.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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Sturge Town is a stunning collection of poems that connects with the earliest days of Kwame Dawes’ work as a poet, from the roots of childhood in Ghana to the reflections of a man turned sixty who is witnessing his children occupying the space he once considered his own. It ranges from poems that make something special of the everyday, to poems of the most astonishing imaginative leaps. There are poems that speak most movingly of moments of acute self-reflection, family crises and losses through death, and there are the inventive poems of the dramatist drawn to create the stories of a rich variety of characters, many springing from the observation of paintings. Metrically careful and sonorous, these poems engage in a personal dialogue with the reader, serious, confessional, alarmed and sometimes teasing. They create highly visualised spaces, observed, remembered, imagined, the scenes of both outward and inner journeys. Organised in five sections, Sturge Town is a collection of finely shaped individual poems with the architecture of a densely interconnected whole, with the soaring grandeur and intimacy of a cathedral – both above and below ground. As the site of the ruined ancestral home of the Dawes, in one of the earliest post-slavery free villages in Jamaica, Sturge Town is both an actual place, a place of myth and a metaphor of the journeying that has taken Kwame Dawes from Ghana, through Jamaica, through South Carolina and now to Nebraska. It parallels a journeying through time, both personal, family and ancestral in which a keen sense of mortality makes life all the more precious.

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Henry Swanzy (1915-2004) has an unrivalled position as the midwife of Caribbean writing in the post 1950s period. As the editor of the BBC Caribbean Voices programme (initiated by Una Marson) between 1946 and 1956, he was there as the careers of George Lamming, Edgar Mittelholzer, Jan Carew, V.S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon and many others took off in London. As a programme aimed in the first place at a Caribbean listenership, Swanzy encouraged writing that was authentic to its Caribbean roots, in language, theme and social concern. As an Irishman, Swanzy retained enough of a post-colonial sensibility to be positively sympathetic to the nationalist thrust of the writing. He was evidently well-respected by the writers to whom he offered both literary and personal support – and not least for his awareness of their pecuniary needs. Once Caribbean Voices was well established, it was left in the hands of Caribbean editors (including Mittelholzer and V.S. Naipaul) and Swanzy himself went off to Ghana in 1956 to encourage and support writers and broadcasting there. Thanks to the generosity of Swanzy’s heirs, his private and often amusingly indiscreet diaries of this period (known as “Ichabod”) have been made available and carefully edited and documented by the team of Niblett, Campbell and Smith. With an introduction that puts Swanzy and these radio programmes in context, this is both an essential, entertaining and highly readable book for anyone even remotely interested in the development of Caribbean writing. Not least of its value is the extensive appendix where Niblett et al. have documented all the writers mentioned in the diary. This, in itself, is a salutary reminder of the wealth of writing talent in both the Caribbean and Ghana that flowered in this period but then, in the absence of other opportunities, in many cases undeservedly disappeared from view.

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This collection is a call to arms that opens out the struggle for human survival in the epoch of the Anthropocene to remind us that this began not just in the factories of Europe but in the holds of the slave ships and plantations of the Caribbean. No natural world was more changed than the West Indian islands by sugar monoculture – and as the title poem begins: “At the end of this sentence, a flood will rise/ and swallow low-lying islands of the Caribbean”. Historically, “the debris of empire that crowd our shores” connects to the “sands of our beaches / littered with masks and plastic bottles.” Philp’s powerful and elegant poems that span past and present make it very clear that there cannot be a moral response to the climate crisis that is not also embedded in the struggle for social justice, for overcoming the malignancies of empire and colonialism and against the power of global capitalism –the missions of the West that had and have at their heart the ideology of white supremacy. These are poems of wit and anger, but also of personal intimacy – the vexed relationship with a violent father – and line after line of the shapeliest poetry – in sound, in rhythm and the exact choice of word.

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At the end of V.S. Naipaul’s satire on Hindu life in Trinidad, The Mystic Masseur, the protagonist, Ganesh Ramsumair, caps his rise to fame as a colonial politician, by transforming himself into an English gentleman, G. Ramsay Muir, and heading off to England. In Naipaul’s novel, Ganesh’s wife, Leela, plays a very secondary, indeed recessive role, though there are occasional clues that she has a clearer grasp of reality than her husband. In the hidden spaces of Naipaul’s novel, J. Vijay Maharaj creates a quite different kind of story for Leela, who decides that when her husband abandons Trinidad for England, she is too much attached to her life on the island to follow him. All this is relayed to the author by Leela in her later years, in a series of tape-recordings, which form the basis for the novel. This is much more than a necessary rewriting of the male-centredness of VS Naipaul’s perspective, though Maharaj creates an inventive and often richly humorous counter-narrative within that novel’s plotlines, as well as a dynamic afterlife for Leela after Naipaul’s novel ends. Maharaj creates for Leela an utterly convincing and compelling voice -- earthy, shrewd and in love with life -- of a woman who not only has a clear vision of her place in the world, but is a vigorous advocate for the inner vitality of Indo-Trinidadian life in the 1940s and 1950s, a world that V.S. Naipaul seems only to have known at its fringes and rejected as absurd. J. Vijay Maharaj’s triumph is to have created something quite remarkable, a novel that has all the dynamic and voice we expect from fiction, and a depth of insight into the texture of Indo-Trinidadian culture that has few parallels.

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After completing four collections of dialogue in poems, Kwame Dawes in Nebraska (via Ghana and Jamaica) and John Kinsella in Western Australia, have produced a monumental fifth volume in four movements: unHistory. unHistory is an essential record of our times by two world-leading poets, acutely sensitive to the bracing global turmoil of the last five years. It is an exploration of history’s undertones, its personal, familial and institutional resonances and of the relationship between public events and the literary imagination. It is at the same time an elegant enactment of friendship and memory. As in previous volumes, the marvel is poetry that has all the fluidity of spontaneous response, and the shapeliness and finesse of the most deeply considered work written by two prolific and influential writers at the height of their powers as poets. “What Dawes and Kinsella provide each other with is less a means of achieving perfect insight than of casting light on the other’s blindnesses." Will Harris on Speak from Here to There “Kwame Dawes is one of the most important writers of his generation who has built a mighty and lasting body of work.” Elizabeth Alexander “John Kinsella is one of Australia’s most vivid, energetic and stormy poets, a writer who turns to the natural world with a fierce light.” Edward Hirsch, Washington Post

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From the colonial idea of ‘British’ tea; the demasculinising experience of infertility in a Jamaican family; a Black woman being both tourist and tourist attraction on her travels in South Asia, and what it meant to be ‘everybody’s midwife’ in an institutionally racist NHS, through to the experience of an Indian migrant child in the ‘country of 'the oppressor’ -- these are just a few of the themes explored in Weighted Words a new anthology by Peepal Tree Press’ Readers and Writers Group.The group comprises writers living in Leeds and West Yorkshire. Through poetry, short stories, confessionals and memoirs, contributors interrogate race, gender, relationship with self and with family, as well as identity in contemporary Britain.Moments of self-reflection sit alongside longer accounts of familial conflicts, personal struggles, and the enduring repercussions of marginalisation.Edited by Jacob Ross, Weighted Words includes the work of established poets like Malika Booker, Khadijah Ibrahiim and Sai Murray alongside previously unpublished writers. Here, a dazzling mix of fresh perspectives and backgrounds mesh and complement each other in a powerful collage of individual experiences, giving rise to a rich and wide-ranging anthology.

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Monica Minott’s poems grasp the reader’s attention with a voice that is distinctively personal, both taut and musical – and tender and muscular when the occasion demands. Her language moves seamlessly and always appropriately between standard and Jamaican patwa, a reflection of a vision that encompasses a Black modernity still very much in touch with its aphoristic folk roots, where the ancestral meets Skype or a Jonkonnu band is stuck in a Kingston traffic jam. It is possible to see Minott’s poems as being in a constant dialogue between four quadrants of engagement: with history, with landscape, with personal and family experience and with the worlds of literature, music and art. Minott’s sense of history is deeply informed by a knowledge of the brutalities of commercial empire and of slavery and Black people’s struggles against injustice and for selfhood. There is scarcely a poem that does not have some precisely described sense of the materiality of its circumstance and the interactions between the physical world and human feelings. You sense that what sustains a certain bravery of self-exposure and of risk is a sense of belonging to family histories that have taught endurance, of knowing that loss can be gain (and this is certainly a world into which tragedy intrudes) and the experience of “running from extremity to extremity, to glory”. In literature and the arts, books are “bright lamps to light away dark hours”, and the examples of musicians like Don Drummond and Rico Rodriquez, artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and dancer Barry Moncrieffe point to the possibilities of the transcendent arising out of the everyday. Literature is a way of seeing that connects “Telemachus,/ original rasta and broomseller” of the Kingston streets to the Ulyssean world of voyaging and of seeking a home.

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This beautiful collection of interviews, conducted by journalist, poet, novelist and artist Jacqueline Bishop, features insightful and entertaining conversations with many of Jamaica's most significant writers including Olive Senior, Lorna Goodison, Marcia Douglas and many more.

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The Sea Needs No Ornament/ El mar no necesita ornamento is the first bilingual anthology of contemporary poetry by women writers of the English and Spanish-speaking Caribbean and its diasporas to be curated in more than two decades. The anthology presents a selection of work by poets from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and from various Anglophone Caribbean islands and the Diaspora. Each poem is presented first in the original, followed by the translation. Excitingly, the majority of poets have not yet been widely translated or included in a bilingual anthology of this scope.

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Set in a colonial Caribbean country in the post-war years, Stranger at the Gate has the narrative drive of a Hemingway novel, the ominous sense of fate of classical Greek tragedy, a sensuous appreciation of a landscape, domestic interiors and food that draws on Hearne’s own Jamaica, and an acute, if indulgent, portrayal of the white and light-brown landed and commercial elite. Stranger at the Gate was originally published in 1956 by Faber and Faber, and is part of the Peepal Tree Caribbean Modern Classics series.The stranger is a revolutionary leader escaping from certain death in a Francophone Caribbean state that has suffered a counter-coup aided by the big state to the north. As a leading member of a small communist party in the imagined state of Cuyuna, Roy McKenzie, has the dangerous task of hiding the escaped Etienne and then getting him off the island to be picked up by a passing Polish ship. McKenzie, a lawyer, a light brown man of elite background, radicalised by his wartime experiences, has to acknowledge that his party’s roots among the black working class are very shallow, and that his only hope of helping Etienne is to turn to his friends among the very elite he is supposedly committed to destroy. When he involves his oldest friend, Carl Brandt, and the woman who becomes his lover, in his mission, he sets in train a sequence of events that test the boundaries of the personal and the political in the deepest and most tragic ways.Set in a colonial Caribbean country in the post-war years, Stranger at the Gate has the narrative drive of a Hemingway novel, the ominous sense of fate of classical Greek tragedy, a sensuous appreciation of a landscape, domestic interiors and food that draws on Hearne’s own Jamaica, and an acute, if indulgent, portrayal of the white and light-brown landed and commercial elite.When Hearne’s novel was first published it was heavily criticised by Caribbean radicals for its evasive politics. Reading Stranger at the Gate over 60 years later, those reservations must still apply, but the passing of time allows us to see what a fine handler of character, structurer of narrative and fine writer of prose John Hearne was; and his portrayal of the Caribbean upper-class – at least in its own self-perceptions – is unrivalled, and still pertinent, since this is a class that has scarcely gone away.The cover of Stranger at the Gate features Ralph Campbell's, Gully (oil on canvas, 1951). Courtesy of the University of the West Indies Library, Mona, Jamaica.

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The stimulus for these poems is a collection of photographs taken of the poet’s father, originally from colonial Sri Lanka, who was serving as a radio operator in an otherwise all white platoon in the 1939-45 desert war in North Africa. As for so many who came back from war to start or resume a family life, there was a great gulf of silence, an unwillingness to speak of those experiences. The collection begins and ends in an imaginative recreation of the life suggested in those photographs, many reproduced in this collection. There is connection with a much-loved father, but also a sense of the unknowable. Speaking in the voice of the father and of the unknown photographer, poems explore the mix of male camaraderie and casual racism of that experience, but also the deep affection hinted at in the way the photographer has framed “Snowball” in his lens. From this imaginative core, poems move out to make connections with the remembered and known life of a father who died too soon, to self-reflections on the poet as remembrancer, creator and actor in the world. There are moving poems on the meaning of inherited objects – a paper-knife, letters – and inherited ways of being – the birdwatching that provides a rich source of imagery. The personal moves out to the resonances of what was, in its origins, a story of migration. Here the father’s success in finding of a home in Yorkshire is seen to contrast sharply with the tragedies of migrant deaths in the face of fortress Europe. This is a work of great beauty, whose lucid simplicity of language is married to a rich complexity of structure and the bird-flight of images that connect poem to poem. There is humour, too, in the revenant voice of the mother who inserts herself into the poet’s memory and demands in her “broad Yorkshire vowels […] ‘Why is your dad getting all the attention?’”

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“Reader, my ‘library’ is not what it sounds”, says the columnist Raul Butler-Singh, writing a piece in the Trinidad Guardian in 2077 to argue that making heterosexuality illegal “may be attended with some inconvenience”. Like his character’s borrowing from J. Swift, Anton Nimblett raids his library and tampers artfully with its sound. In “Spouter Inn”, he reimagines the classic opening of Moby Dick (where Ishmael shares a bed with Queequeg and has the best night’s sleep ever) and imagines the tattoed harpoonist’s backstory that Melville never wrote. In “Something Promised”, Nimblett makes the ultimately odious Mr. Slime in George Lamming’s classic In the Castle of My Skin into quite a different kind of person, a gentle gay man who reflects, “Nobody never ask, What it is that make Mr Slime happy, eh?” In “Perseverence Village”, David Das shares much of the outward circumstance of V.S. Naipaul’s Mr Biswas – except that his most profound experience is a gay sexual encounter in his teens. But Nimblett does not only revisit the absences of past fiction; a wide range of characters are caught in the midst of their missions for self-knowledge, such as Anglican Joyce who wonders how much she has actually chosen her path away from her Spiritual Baptist roots, or Errol who discovers that “If a man pays close enough attention, he finds there is a place, one place, where he is most himself” – which for Errol is his taxi. These are stories that repay close attention. Nimblett is a writer who listens for the background notes, who knows “people not easy, not even the people who look like you”, who knows “you would get fool if you believe simple is easy, or simple not important”. Whether set in rural Trinidad or urban New York, these stories will enhance Anton Nimblett’s reputation as one of the most generous and humane of observers of human life, male or female, gay or straight.

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In using an epigraph from the 18th century poet Christopher Smart, for years incarcerated in the madhouse (“For I am not without authority in my jeopardy”), Nicholas Laughlin stakes his case for a poetics of radical innocence (for “The less you know, the less mistaken”) that includes the accidental, the punning slip, the puzzlingly axiomatic, (“You bruise a grammar before it bruises you”). Indeed, when a poem speaks of “the unstable topography” of dreams, some readers may feel they have arrived at a more stable and recognisable place. This is a poetics by no means without Caribbean precedent. Like the brilliant Jamaican poet, Anthony McNeill with his “mutants” (retained typos), for Laughlin “Errors are not accidents”.Enemy Luck is almost an encyclopaedia of ingenious devices and forms: cut-outs that hint at kidnapping threats; a poem that resembles the often mystifying chapter summaries of the 19th century novel (in which…); visits to geographical territories mutated from a Wilson Harris fiction (Borges is also an inspiration); found fragments; lengthier extracts from a variety of sources, from Strabo to Oliver Goldsmith, whose meaning is changed by their new contexts; Poundian translations where the original is absorbed into a characteristic Laughlin voice rather than being attempts to replicate the original; an index to some fugitive travel narrative that invites the reader to construct their own story; seemingly absurd narratives that make perfectly good sense; seemingly realistic narratives that mystify like an Escher building; a cast of personas from Cousin Hermes to King Q.Here is a collection that invites us to active reading, to picking up clues, to inserting ourselves into the dialogue between the poems. Above all, Nicholas Laughlin challenges us to think about the expectations and accumulated experiences we bring to the shaping influence of a variety of literary forms – and helps us to deconstruct them.

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“City of Bones is a poet’s testament, his vision of time’s past and future. Composed in a language that is highly intelligent, tightly wrought, and buoyant—the inherent lyric quality derives its swing from reggae, blues, jazz, gospel, and spoken-word traditions—it is a road map tarred in civilizational wisdom. This is an astonishingly fine book. If I were to predict a future Nobel Prize winner in literature, it would more than likely be Kwame Dawes.”—Sudeep Sen, author of EroText and editor of The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry“In this book-length journey, Kwame Dawes guides the reader through the many circles of mnemonic hell. His are poems nailed into the white pages with the force of bestial silence; thick-neck poems written by a poet with hands and ear for old bones, for the shattering of breaking time, for the rituals of manhood. Whenever I picked a new book from the shelf, I always hoped it would be exactly this.” —Valzhyna Mort, author of Factory of Tears“This testament is one of the remarkable books of contemporary English-language letters. I celebrate Dawes and his achievement, and in doing so celebrate all those who have a space in his poems and all those who are able to tune into his remarkable music, intellect, and spirit.”—John Kinsella, author of Jam Tree Gully and Firebreaks“Extending Kwame Dawes’s already wide-ranging and prolific body of work, City of Bones is a testament to a complicated past that replays itself in the daily lives of so many Americans today. In the shadow of the Thirteenth Amendment Dawes remixes the works of August Wilson and brings lucidity to our present moment. Unafraid to trouble the waters and make clear why American race relations exist as they currently do, City of Bones sets the record straight and leaves no doubt that the past is ever present and we have not yet overcome. City of Bones should leave no question in the minds of any contemporary reader that Kwame Dawes is one of the most significant poets working today. This is poetry’s ‘Redemption Song.’”—Matthew Shenoda, author of Tahrir Suite“Why read Kwame Dawes? Because he knows how to ‘listen for the calm voice of God.’ Because he will show you how to grieve and not be torn open. Because his poem “The Things You Forget in Jail” shares with us empathy so unlike that of most North American poets at work today. Go back to him because Dawes is in love with ‘music of mint, ginger root, garlic, sweet / onion” of our language, its tormented ‘promise of good earth.’ Why read him? Because words ‘when spoken will soften / your chest.’ Why read Kwame Dawes? Because you cannot stop. Because Dawes is the poet to read when ‘all talking / is over’ and you sit alone in this room.” —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa

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From the vantage point of later middle life, Ian McDonald's collection looks into the heart of time passing: the coming death of aging parents, the old men, the sight of 'my own lines of age' and the loss of pleasure in the glittering carnival of the senses. There are joys in the rich blessings of the arrival of a new child coming unexpected at this stage of life, but those joys are made more piquant by the inescapable sense of the ephemeral. Poems of moving domestic intimacy and humor ('To alarm their fathers half to death/New-born babies hold their breath'), valedictory requiems for the characters who have given Georgetown life its flavor and regret for the country's loss of civility during its darkest recent years and songs in praise of nature are all part of a vision which looks into the darkness but says, 'Yes, it is as you say, / But let us get just one thing straight: / There is beauty in the world/ ... And the star-tree blossoms in the night, /Night that will have an end.'

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Madwoman is McCallum’s fifth collection of poetry. Haunting and elusive, the poems in Shara McCallum's Madwoman are also transformative, seeking to chart and intertwine three stages of a mother's life from childhood to adulthood to motherhood. Rich with the complexities that join these states of being, the poems wrestle with the idea of being girl, woman and mother at once. McCallum questions how we form our identities and who shapes those identities for us.

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Colin Robinson’s long-awaited debut collection, You Have You Father Hard Head, represents a nuanced but unswerving engagement with desire and intimacy as he explores what it means to be a Caribbean son negotiating the complexities of relationships between men.In poems of generous vulnerability and intimacy, Robinson captures the voice of boys on whose spirits and “hard heads” their mothers live out the memory of their fathers. Robinson’s verse, which is acutely aware of the troubled history of race, politics and identity in Caribbean society, is taut, ironic, and richly evocative of various landscapes and cultures that have shaped him over the years. He manages to sustain a tonal authenticity in these polyvalent poems that make use of both terse epigrammatic forms and longer, expansive narrative forms.Uniquely, and importantly, You Have You Father Hard Head, breaks new ground in Caribbean poetry as it explores with distinctively Caribbean candour, wit and irony themes of sexual love between men and views of life with HIV. Here is poetry of admirable honesty and acute self-awareness:i have never felt safe in manhoodand thirty years sincei last set foot in queens park ovaljust below the surfaceof my grand gesture of godfatherhoodis the panic like that dayat being discovered as a fakeor worsediscovered to be faking(“Manhood at the Oval”)

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This compendium of Edgar Mittelholzer’s uncollected by Juanita Cox, brings together his early collection of sketches of Georgetown life, Creole Chips, his speculative novella, The Adding Machine, twenty-four short stories, two short plays, his published and unpublished poetry and essays covering travel, literature and his personal beliefs. This is mostly work written before Mittelholzer came to England in search of publishing opportunities. It shows a writer still deeply concerned with the Caribbean, a writer of playful humour who is committed to entertain, not to preach as his later work tends to do, and a writer who wrote in a variety of genres (speculative fiction, crime, and the Gothic) that contemporary Caribbean writers are rediscovering.

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Fossil explores the impact of human activity on climate change though a post-colonial lens and from the perspective of all life on earth including plants, creatures, elements and inanimate objects. “The poems in Fossil have been waiting millions of years to be born. Maya Chowdhry’s language erupts out of deep time, vital and vivid. This is powerful work.” Robert MinhinnickFossil explores planet earth as she experiences anthropogenic climate change, it examines the impacts of climate chaos and the resultant implications of climate justice for the human species. The collection takes its subject seriously through a playful testing of language.Voices of plants, trees, fossils, rocks, bodies of water and creatures speak about the human impacts on the climate of our planet. Interspersed with these poems are poems exploring some of the reasons that the earth is being exploited for capital by humans and what this means for all life on earth. Birds, insects and other plants comment on how humans are enslaving them for their gain.The false selling of constellations, what scientists might be releasing when they core into the ice caps and a war over a glacier are all topics for this collection that interrogates the scientific, transmuting the language through the feathers of an albatross, the sap of a Spider Orchid, a Banksia dentata seed bursting into life.

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A boy is killed on a government minister's orders as part of his mission to clean up the country and others made complicit must explore their consciences; a youth gets ready to play his role in the country's lucrative kidnap business; a sister tries to make peace with the parents of the white American girl her brother has murdered; a gangster makes his posthumous lament: Trinidad in all its social tumult is ever present in these stories, but so too are the lives of those with private griefs: a woman mourning the still-birth of her child; a mother grieving the loss of her breasts and trying to protect her children from the knowledge of her cancer.The stories in this collection range across Trinidad's different ethnic communities; across rural and urban settings; include the moneyed elite (and the illicit sources of new wealth) and the poor scrabbling for survival; locals and expatriates; the certainties of rational knowledge bumps up against the mysteries of the unseen and the uncanny.What ties the collection together are not only the characters who thread their way across different stories, and the intensive focus on women's lives, but Sharon Millar's achievement of a distinctively personal voice: cool, unsentimental and empathetic; a keen sense of place and her ability to bring it to the reader's eyes. If irony is the only way to inscribe contemporary Trinidad, there is also room for both generous humour and the possibility of redemption.

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Edward Baugh has one of the most recognisable voices in Caribbean poetry: his dry wit, poise and elegance, his constant capacity to surprise with the range of his concerns. Black Sand comprises poems selected from Baugh's two previous collections, A Tale from the Rain Forest (1988) and It was the Singing (2000), plus a collection's worth of new poems. His subject matter ranges wide: race, history, sport, love, the academic life, the consolations of natural beauty. He also casts a shrewd eye over a Jamaica characterised by urbane polish, gated communities, religious enthusiasm, and a black majority still struggling against the wrongs of the past."Edward Baugh has been able... to avoid imitation and stay tellingly brief in the midst of such epic scale... He does not disappoint."The Poetry ArchiveEdward Baugh was born in Jamaica in 1936. Growing up in Port Antonio, he witnessed the unusual sight of his small hometown being taken over by the Hollywood actor Errol Flynn, whose private yacht was anchored in the bay. A Commonwealth Scholarship later took him to Manchester University, where he gained his PhD. He edited Derek Walcott's Selected Poems (2007); a monograph, Derek Walcott, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007, and reissued in 2012. Edward taught at the University of the West Indies for over thirty years, and has held various visiting posts in the UK and the US.

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The poems in Irki rise out of Kadija Sesay's experiences – amusing, loving, confusing, sad – of growing up in foster care in the UK after leaving her home country of Sierra Leone.'Irki' means 'homeland' in the Nubian language, a language and history fast becoming extinct, but the poems conjure up images of home as an imagined, remembered, still physical place. Writing as a second-generation West African, Kadija also recounts her arrival to the UK (with parents of different religions), and her experience of growing up Black against the racially divided background of Britain in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.Kadija Sesay was born in Sierra Leone. She read West African studies at Birmingham University, then became a freelance journalist. In the mid-1990s she set up the newspaper Calabash. She founded SABLE LitMag in 2001 and the SABLE LitFest in 2005. Kadija has edited several important anthologies, including IC3: the Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (2000), co-edited with Courttia Newland; Write Black, Write British (2005); and Red: An Anthology of Contemporary Black British Poetry (Peepal Tree, 2010), co-edited with Kwame Dawes. Her own poems have appeared in anthologies published by Canongate, Apples & Snakes, Macmillan and Flipped Eye. She lives in London.

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This collection of short stories travels from the lush hills and sunny beaches of Jamaica to London, New York and Calcutta, following the hearts and desires of Caribbean people in search of love and the means to make a life in unfamiliar places.In the title story, a Jamaican youth hustles a living as an escort to European and American tourists. In 'Fevergrass Tea' a young woman returns from New York to her hometown in Jamaica, to find that the rules of class and romance have very much changed. In 'Elephant Dreams', Black Londoner Jewel's dreams of riding an elephant lead her to India, where her lover Arjun will introduce her to his family. In 'Precious and her Hair', a young girl goes to extremes to attract the local Romeo. Together the stories are funny, romantic, vivid and moving in their insight into lives of self-discovery, and self-deception.Ifeona Fulani is the author of Seasons of Dust (1997) and Archipelagos of Sound: Transnational Caribbeanities, Women and Music (forthcoming). She has also written a children's story, Visitors, and a screenplay based on a novel by James Baldwin, On Beale Street. She has had short stories published in the Beacon's Best anthology series, in Small Axe, and in Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noir. She currently teaches Writing at New York University.

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Re-issue of two classics of Caribbean theatre; part of Peepal Tree's popular Caribbean Modern Classics series.Couvade, first performed in Guyana in 1972 and published by Cape in 1974, references the Amerindian ritual where the man takes to his bed and 'suffers' some equivalent to the pains of childbirth while his partner is in labour. And while Pat is giving birth, her artist husband Lionel has become obsessed with the Amerindian-style painting he is working on... Couvade is a powerful dream-play of ritual, shamanism and the overwhelming forces of the past. A Pleasant Career is based on the biography of the pioneering Guyanese novelist, Edgar Mittelholzer. The play explores Mittelholzer's early experiences of the racial and class hierarchies of British Guiana, of being the 'swarthy' boy in a predominantly white family, and of his resolute determination to beat down the doors of the London publishing world. It also gazes into some of the demons within, held in creative balance in his earlier years, but ending later in a fiery suicide. Despite its unassuming title, A Pleasant Career is a richly rewarding play of dramatic incident and psychological speculation. Michael Gilkes was born in Guyana in 1935. He is a distinguished Caribbean critic and dramatist, and more recently a film-maker. A Pleasant Career won the prestigious Guyana Prize for Drama in 1992. He won the Guyana Prize again in 2006 for his play The Last of the Redmen. He now lives in Bermuda.

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First published to great acclaim in 1987, Angel begins in 1951, when the workers of Grenada revolted against the white estate owners, moving forward to 1983 when the US invaded to put an end to a radical experiment that had turned violently in on itself. At the story's heart are the headstrong Angel and her mother, Doodsie. What makes Angel such a rewarding novel to return to, especially in this revised new edition, is the seamless movement between the warmth and tensions of family life and the seriousness of irruptive, life-changing political conflict."[There is] a richness, a thickness, a stinging slangy that-there thingyness of observation and detail…" Robert Nye, The GuardianMerle Collins was born in 1950 in Aruba. She was deeply involved in the Grenadian revolution and served as a research coordinator for the Government of Grenada. Her second novel, The Colour of Forgetting, was published in 1995, and her short-story collection The Ladies are Upstairs by Peepal Tree in 2011. Her third and most recent poetry collection is Lady in a Boat (Peepal Tree, 2003). She teaches Caribbean Literature at the University of Maryland.

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In 1989, Velma Pollard's Considering Woman, a collection of short stories, fables and memoir, announced an important publishing debut. Now, over twenty years later, a second collection, Considering Woman II, various and rich in its own right, is brought into dialogue with the republishing of the earlier pieces in a single volume. Dialogue between its components is, indeed, intrinsic to the organisation of Considering Woman II. Whilst the stories in 'Bitter Tales' are very explicitly set in the past, they are often accompanied by a present-day women's talk commenting on the story. In 'Mrs Uptown' for instance, we learn that what begins as a story of male abandonment, but becomes an account of a woman who finds a good man and happiness, is being told by the now elderly woman to her neighbour at a conference called 'Young Women in Crisis'. It is clear that the world presented in these pungently written stories of rape, abuse and unsupported pregnancies is not safely in the past. And the balancing sequence of 'Better Tales', each of which arrives at some place of epiphany, safety and even contentment, does so in a world where babies are abandoned in pit latrines, where poverty forces families to give away their children, and a young woman has five unsupported children by the age of twenty-five. If the later stories no longer feel the need to reflect on the process and reception of women's writing (which the earlier collection does very wittily), across all the work is an acutely sensitive consciousness of the consequences of the passage of time. 'Gran…', the longest piece in the book, is both a deeply moving account of the consequences of growing old, and a record of a vanishing way of life.Velma Pollard writes poetry, fiction and studies of language. She was born in Jamaica and works at the University of the West Indies where she is Dean of the Faculty of Education.

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An unnamed narrator in 1960s London reflects on three periods of his life in Guyana which altered his understanding of the world. In 1948 he witnesses a march of workers protesting the killing of their comrades by police during a bitter strike; and so begins a radical revision of Wordsworth's strategy of exploring imagination, memory and event in The Prelude. Harris challenges the reader by removing the props of linear narrative and conventional characterisation, offering in their place a Proustian richness of sensuous associations – proof positive of his status as one of the Caribbean's most original and visionary writers.Wilson Harris was born in Guyana in 1921. Resident in the UK since 1959, since his retirement he has been in demand as visiting professor and writer in residence at many leading universities. He has twice won the Guyana Prize for Literature. In 2010 he was knighted in 2010 for his services to literature.

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In 1970 and 1971, Wilson Harris published two short story collections that explored the myths, fables and fragments of history of the Amerindian peoples of Guyana and the Caribbean. These are brought together in the current volume. The Sleepers of Roraima, subtitled "A Carib Trilogy" focuses on the ironic fate of the Caribs, the feared conquerors of other Amerindian peoples, the cannibals of European legend, but in the present the most vanished, almost extinct of all these groups. In The Age of the Rainmakers, each of the stories focuses on one of the groups still present in Guyana: the Macusi, Arecuna, Wapisiana and Arawaks. In the absence of reliable history, and in the face of the stereotypes attached to these people (such as stoicism or a propensity for laughter), Harris makes no attempt to write conventional fictional reconstructions of an ethnographic kind, but subjects the fragments of tribal lore to imaginative revision. His stories work towards the discovery of what is "original" in the sense of primordial in these narratives, in discovering such common patterns as the loss of innocence, the connections between sacrifice and transcendence, or even the shared identities of cannibal and Eucharistic consumption.

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Nii Ayikwei Parkes' début collection encompasses the story of a triangular trade in reverse – a family history that goes from the Caribbean back to Sierra Leone, and in his own life from London to Ghana, and back again.His gift as a poet is for the most rewarding kind of story-telling, including those stories told with wit and an engaging ambivalence about himself. His narratives move unerringly to a perfect punch-line, but in the collection as a whole there is a refreshing lack of complacency in his willingness to move out of his comfort zone and explore areas of imaginative fantasy, as in his Ballast series, a tour de force of defamiliarisation, where he imagines how the slave trade would have gone had its mode of transport been the hot air balloon, rather than the slave ship. There is much humour, but it comes from a family tradition of knowing that 'our jokes weren't really funny, they were just sad/ stories we learned to laugh at'. Like all poets with a largeness of heart, with no embarrassment about embracing the deepest feelings, Parkes has an especial sensitivity to the promise and acute sensitivities of childhood, both his own and others."An astonishing, powerful remix of history and language and the possibilities of both" Ali Smith, The GuardianNii Ayikwei Parkes is the author of three poetry pamphlets. In 2007 he was awarded Ghana's National ACRAG award for poetry and literary advocacy.

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Christian Campbell takes us to dusk, what the French call l'heure entre chien et loup, the hour between dog and wolf, to explore ambiguity and intersection, danger and desire, loss and possibility. These poems of wild imagination shift shape and shift generation, remapping Caribbean, British and African American geographies: Oxford becomes Oxfraud; Shabba Ranks duets with Césaire; Sidney Poitier is reconsidered in an exam question; market women hawk poetry beside knock-off Gucci bags; elegies for ancestors are also for land and sea. Here is dancing at the crossroads between reverence and irreverence. Dusk is memory, dusk is dream, dusk is a way to re-imagine the past.Running the Dusk won the 2010 Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was shortlisted for the 2010 Forward Poetry Prize for the Best First Book in the UK. It was also named a finalist for the Cave Canem Prize by Sonia Sanchez."Running the Dusk gives us a new voice for Caribbean arts and letters, and Christian Campbell is one of the few perfectly suited to accept this mantle. His poems don't address the obvious in a tumultuous, beautiful landscape of hearts and minds, personal and public rituals, but his voice dares to take a step beyond, to bridge the diaspora of the spirit. If you're holding Running the Dusk in your hands, you are lucky to be facing the gutsy work of a long-distance runner who possesses the wit and endurance, the staying power of authentic genius. This first collection is controlled beauty and strength, and the exhilaration of images and music encountered are necessary and believable. There's great celebration here."Yusef Komunyakaa, Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet and Global Distinguished Professor of English at NYU"A truly auspicious debut by a brilliant young writer of wide-open ear and versatile tongue. Campbell's imagery slices through fog; these poems are nourished by New World etymologies and old-school ways and wisdoms. His use of poetic form is drum-tight and yet these poems unfold like the infinity of a coast-line, sinuous and generous. In the black diaspora Campbell writes from and about, 'all angels have afros' and all poems are song. Running the Dusk is deep-souled, keen-eyed, knowing, honed, gorgeous. This is a heralding book we'll be talking about for a long time to come."Elizabeth Alexander, Obama's Inaugural Poet and Chair of African American Studies at Yale UniversityChristian Campbell studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. His poetry and essays have been published widely in the Caribbean, the United Kingdom and North America.

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Most migrants arrive at their destinations by a combination of serendipity and choicelessness. The question – how did you arrive here? – is always answered with a convoluted mix of myth, love, family ties, budget, language, persecution, opportunity and interruption. This has been Nii Parkes' own experience, and in South of South he brings together a distinguished selection of contemporary writers who feel the same way. With stories from Romesh Gunesekera, Zoe Wicomb, Nam Le, Monica Arac de Nyeko, Tahmina Anam, Brian Chikwava, Niki Aguirre, Junot Diaz and Naomi Alderman, this is a rich mix of writing re-imagining the dynamics of migration in the 21st century.Nii Ayikwei Parkes was born in the UK and raised in Ghana. A former Poet-in-Residence at the Poetry Café, he has performed on major stages across the world, including at The Royal Festival Hall and at the London Mayor's vigil on July 14, 2005 in response to the London bombings. His most recent collection is The Makings of You (Peepal Tree, 2010). His poem 'Tin Roof' was selected for Poems on the Underground in 2007 and his novel Tail of the Blue Bird was published by Jonathan Cape in 2009. Nii also co-edited the groundbreaking Tell Tales: Volume I short story anthology (2005) with Courttia Newland.

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Wayne Brown's On the Coast was first published in 1972. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in the UK and established Brown as one of the finest young poets of the post-Walcott generation. It was followed in 1988 by Voyages, a collection that amply showed the maturing of Brown's remarkable gifts but was rarely available. Now, long after some of the 'revolutionary' poets are forgotten, it is possible to see that Brown's work has been seminal in Caribbean poetry, both for its intrinsic qualities, and for Brown's crucial role as the mentor of a current generation of Caribbean poets. This edition restores the original text of the 1972 edition and adds the new poems first published in the later collection.Wayne Brown's poems approach the issues of creativity, finding meaning, finding contentment and the threats to these human goals through poems about Caribbean nature (his bestiary of sea creatures makes him a Caribbean Ted Hughes); through anecdote, frequently drawing on family life; through poems about favourite artists such as Neruda, Nabakov, Rilke and the Tobagan poet Eric Roach; through reflecting on the rewards and pain of remaining in the Caribbean compared to the loss suffered by those writers and artists who left the islands.Best known as one of the Caribbean's most incisive commentators, Wayne Brown raised a weekly newspaper column to a literary art. Between 1984 and 2009, some 3,500 editions of his column In Our Time appeared in Trinidadian and Jamaican newspapers

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