Search results for ""Peepal Tree Press Ltd""

This collection explores the fragile territory between remembering and forgetting, both as an individual experience and in the life of a society. If in the end all is subject to “time’s slow bleed”, these poems enact the capacity of the imagination “to pass through ancient walls” and to reorder failures long gone in time into more hopeful connections. Poems recreate those childhood moments when physical presences, such as the “great house” at Drax Hall provoke the “beginning of poetry”, the searching for what is “hidden in the dark”, and thence to a grasp of the history that society would rather forget. For while forgetting is human, the collection also explores how amnesia can be cultivated in society as a means of hiding the sources of contemporary privilege and economic power. Poems such as “Canvas” (about the images from English and American magazines that patch up the hangings in an old woman’s “tumbledown dwelling”) not only picture children “tiptoe at the rim of the world” but, without needing to say it, show those children as far more familiar with Garbo’s “bright blue eyes/ and shiny red lipstick” than with the history and meaning of Drax Hall. If there are echoes of Walcott’s poem where “all in compassion ends”, Phillips is no less compassionate, but much readier to see “History’s wound still bleeding / to its last drop” – a wound extending down to a powerful poem in memory of George Floyd. If the collection calls out “Speak, stones, bear witness!”, poems also pay tribute to those who in the rural village memorialised the lives of the unconsidered poor, who, like the village historian, Miss Lewis, speaks across the years into contemporary urban life “to remind me who I am”. Esther Phillips’ poems are always lucid and musical; they gain a rewarding complexity from being part of the collection’s careful architecture that offers a richly nuanced inner dialogue about the meaning of experience in time. Not least powerful in this conversation are the sequence of poems about Barbadian childhoods, poems of grace, humour and insight. When Barbados chose Esther Phillips as its first poet laureate it knew what it was doing: electing a poet who could speak truth, who could challenge and console her nation – and all of us.

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In musical, evocative language, her poems imagine the what-if-that-almost-was of Scotland’s best-loved Bard, following Robert Burns into the life he might have lived as a plantation overseer in Jamaica—then seeing his enslaved granddaughter come back to Scotland to claim a life reserved for white women. Evie Shockley This collection is timely and timeless as it reframes the complicated genealogies created by colonialism. Erasure is one of the colonizer’s most insidious tools and McCallum’s gorgeous monologues serve to reclaim the voices ignored, unsaid, and unclaimed because of colonialism. Adrian Matejka A subtle, multi-layered verse narrative… The worlds it vividly presents beget reflections on creativity, history, slavery, race and many other issues. It is an exceptional work, a memorable achievement. Mervyn Morris Seemingly controlled words surge with echoes; poems keep double-entry accounts, striping the page, laddering like stockings. McCallum achieves an un-haunting. Characters are realer than real, less imaginary than re-storied. Like the returning dead, whom nothing ‘will quench or unhunger’, this work wants you, wants us, ‘to begin again’. Vahni Capildeo

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'A manifesto, a literary criticism, a personal chronicle of literary life, a book of days, a stage wherein famous writers such as Walcott, Thomas, Gunn, Espada, and others become actors, The Undiscovered Country discovers many things, but one thing for sure: Andre Bagoo is a fearless, brilliant mind. He can take us from the formal critical perspective to new futurist "visual essay", to verse essay, to sweeping historical account that is unafraid to go as far in time as Columbus and as urgently-of-our moment as Brexit—all of it with precision and attentiveness to detail that is as brilliant as it is startling. Bravo.' — Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in OdessaAndre Bagoo is the real deal as an essayist in that he asks interesting questions (was there an alternative to the independence that Trinidad sought and gained in 1962?) and is open to seeing where his ideas take him – quite often to unexpected places. He displays an intense interest in the world around him – including literature, art, film, food, politics, even Snakes and Ladders – but is just as keen to share with the reader some sense of how his point of view has been constructed. He writes as a gay man who grew up in a country that still has colonial laws against gay sexuality, as a man whose ethnic heritage was both African and Indian in a country whose politics have been stymied by its ethnic divisions. And just what were the effects of repeat-watching a defective video of The Sound of Music, truncated at a crucial moment? There is an engaging personality present here, a sharp and enquiring mind, and ample evidence that he knows how to write shapely sentences and construct well-formed essays. Encyclopaedic knowledge is rarely the point of the essay, but few readers will leave this collection without feeling better informed and more curious about their worlds.

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In the year of Covid-19, lockdowns, and in Trinidad a state of emergency, it’s not surprising that thoughts turn to the nature of time, place and the not quite accidental arrival of pandemics of mass death. For Jennifer Rahim, time is both the history that has shaped the present and the now of social and geographic constriction. At the beginning of the collection, “A Tale of the Orbis Spike, 1610” (the recorded dip in carbon dioxide levels when around fifty million native peoples of the New World were exterminated as the result of European settler invasion), reminds that pandemics have their own history, though never without human triggers. At the end of the collection, “No /Language is a Virus” records the viral power of language for both good and ill, the latter not least in the era of Trump and the resurgence of racist white nationalism in Trinidad’s big neighbour to the north. But Rahim also reminds us how much solace we have derived from poetry this last year, because “Words fly the grave, steal/ the only thunder a virus can claim,/ and, alive,/ witness to goodness that quietly thrives.” Between those two points, the collection expands out of the restrictions of home, that place where “We’re strategizing for survival/ strip-searching every sneeze/ for an invisible assassin suited in capsid” – though sanctuaries of invention can be found in the smallest spaces – to map the wider worlds of memory and desire – in a vivid series of poems (“mapping home”) that chart journeys from Valencia, through Salybia, Balandra, Rampanalgas, Cumana, Toco and L’Anse Noir – places that Rahim’s poems bring to sensuous geographic, human and historical life and make you want to visit,.With the celebration of heroes who range from the fighting women of Greek myth, to poetic inspirations from Marian Moore to Eric Roach, Jennifer Rahim urges that “Hope/ must always be bold/ and sharpened for tomorrows”.

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The third in a quartet of poem-dialogues between Kwame Dawes and John Kinsella, begun in 2015 with the critically acclaimed 'Speak From Here to There' (2016), and followed by 'A New Beginning' (2018), Tangling With The Epic explores commonalities and difference, the results reminding us of how poetry can offer comfort and solace, and how it can ignite a peculiar creative frenzy that enriches.

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Filigree typically refers to the finer elements of craftwork, the parts that are subtle; our 'Filigree' anthology contains work that plays with the possibilities that the word suggests, work that is delicate, that responds to the idea of edging, to a comment on the marginalisation of the darker voice. Filigree includes work from established Black British poets residing inside and outside the UK; new and younger emerging voices of Black Britain and Black poets who have made it their home as well as a selection of the Inscribe poets who we have nurtured and continue to support. They have all responded in compelling ways to the concept of 'Filigree'. Tolu Agbelusi – Sui Anukka – Raymond Antrobus – Lynne E Blackwood – Siddhartha Bose (Sid) – Victoria Bulley – Michael Campbell – Nana-Essi Casely-Hayford – Maya Chowdhry – Rishi Dastidar – Tishani Doshi – Zena Edwards – Samatar Elmi – Christina Fonthes – Patricia Foster – Kat François – Nandita Ghose – Nikheel Gorolay – Keith Jarrett – Maggie Harris – Joshua Idehen – Sumia Jamaa – Pete Kalu – Fawzia Kane – Rachel Long – Adam Lowe – Nick Makoha – Roy Mcfarlane – Ronnie McGrath – Momtaza Mehri – Sai Murray – Selina Nwulu – Louisa Adjoa Parker – Aisha Phoenix – Barsa Ray – Akila Richards – Maureen Roberts – Roger Robinson – Selina Rodrigues – Seni Seneviratne – Ioney Smallhorne – Degna Stone – Hugh Stultz – Ruth Sutoyé – Keisha Thompson – Gemma Weekes

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The poems in The Coup Clock Clicks were written between 1971 and 1988, reflecting the work of the then young political activist, poems challenging indifference, and mainly concerned to understand and, if possible, ameliorate the situation of others. It is also a personal memoir, shaped as autobiography. In reggae-conscious free verse in Jamaican patwa, these poems are fierce, sometimes witty jeremiads against economic and socio-cultural division, poverty, violence, and thwarted lives. The collection is suffused with references to music – mainly Jamaican popular music, heard everywhere, but displaying Meeks’ sharply observant eye, as in his poem about a Marley concert where the detailed fashion notes vividly point to the actual separation of classes in Jamaica.The later poems reflect on the collapse of 1970s' hopes of decolonisation after the widespread defeat of the left through self-inflicted injuries and the new world order of resurgent American power under Ronald Reagan.As Mervyn Morris notes in his introduction, The Coup Clock Clicks is an important contribution to Caribbean poetry. He characterises Meeks as “a resourceful poet” producing “nicely crafted poems… There is plenty of grief in this collection. But resilience also, and philosophical questioning.”

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Indira Gabriel, recently abandoned by her lover, Solomon, embarks on a project to reinvigorate a dilapidated bar into something special. In this funny, sexy, sometimes painful and bittersweet novel, Barbara Jenkins draws together a richly-drawn cast of characters, like a Trinidadian Cheers.Meet Bostic, Solomon’s boyhood friend, who is determined to keep the bar as a shrine; I Cynthia, the tale-telling Belmont maco ; KarlLee, the painter with a very complicated love-life; fatherless Jah-Son; and Fritzie, single mum and Indira’s loyal right-hand woman. At the book’s centre is the unforgettable Indira, with her ebullience and sadness, her sharpness and honesty, obsession with the daily horoscope and addiction to increasingly absurd self-help books. In this warm, funny, sexy, and bittersweet novel, Barbara Jenkins hears, like Sam Selvon, the melancholy behind “the kiff-kiff laughter”, as darkness from Indira’s past threatens her drive to make a new beginning.

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Winner of the Guyana Prize, The Language of Eldorado has been long recognised as an outstanding work of Caribbean poetry. Its beauty lies in its ability to convey complex ideas through concrete images that work on the reader both sensually and intellectually. Its focus is the relationship between language, landscape and the history of human settlement in Guyana. The collection is dedicated to Wilson Harris whose challenging and paradigm-changing ideas on these matters deeply influenced Mark McWatt’s own thinking.

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Since its beginnings 33 years ago, Peepal Tree has published around 45 collections of Caribbean short stories, reinforcing the view that the short story is the Caribbean literary form par excellence. This anthology draws from those collections, plus a few guests, focusing on work written over the past twenty-five years, the majority dealing with the recent post-independence period up to the present. Though quality is the ultimate criteria, this anthology is unrivalled in its range across the Anglophone Caribbean and its diasporas, and representative of Caribbean ethnicities, gender and sexual orientations. Stories offer images of the city from ghettos to gated communities, suburbia, villages, the coastal margins. They display a range of contemporary concerns: social fragmentation, political corruption, sexual politics. They display a range of short story genres from satire, gritty realism, magical realism, fantasy, the gothic, the folkloric, horror, crime, erotica, flash fiction, the speculative…Whilst the stories in the anthology collectively offer an insightful picture of both the contemporary Caribbean and of the current status of the Caribbean short story as a form, the overall editorial aim has been to create a book that gives the reader a rich, varied and rewarding reading experience.The collection includes the work of, amongst others, Opal Palmer Adisa, Christine Barrow, Rhoda Bharath, Jacqueline Bishop, Hazel Campbell, Merle Collins, Cyril Dabydeen, Kwame Dawes, Curdella Forbes, Ifeona Fulani, Keith Jardim, Barbara Jenkins, Meiling Jin, Cherie Jones, Helen Klonaris, Sharon Leach, Jan Shinebourne, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw and N.D. Williams.

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In 2011, the Trinidad government declared a state of emergency and an overnight curfew. The SoE, brought in to combat the crime and killings associated with the drugs trade, was meant to last 15 days but lasted four months. This is the background to these chronicles, but not their substance. They are an imaginative response to the undertones of those days. Taking place over 24 hours, Curfew Chronicles brings together, like a Joyce’s Ulysses in miniature, the lives of two dozen characters (including a father and son searching for each other) whose lives intersect in mostly fortuitous but sometimes quite deliberate ways.From the Minister and his wife, to those targeted by the state; from those in regular jobs, to those who scuffle for a living on or over the edge of the law; from those who speak out, to the hidden hands prepared to silence them: no one is unaffected by the SoE. What makes these stories individually rich (as well as collectively ingenious) is the depth of characterisation. There is Scholar the street-corner prophet, Ragga with his vision of better days, Keeper tempted into crime to the distress of his redoubtable partner Maureen, Sumintra, the Pentecostal convert struck dumb in prayer, Marcus the assassin whose life is a movie, Amber the security guard and poet and her policeman lover Calvin, eager to retire from clearing up little matters like the “weed” found in the PM’s residence, and many more. Each has a resonant backstory; each is caught at a moment of decision or revelation.

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During 2015 and 2016, two poets from opposite sides of the world, Kwame Dawes and John Kinsella, exchanged poems in two cycles, Echoes and Refrains and Illuminations, that were in constant dialogue even as they remained defined and shaped by the details of their own private and public lives.Kwame Dawes’ base was the flat prairieland of Lincoln, Nebraska, a landscape in which he, a black man, originally from Ghana and Jamaica, felt at once alien and deeply committed to the challenges of finding “home”. John Kinsella’s base was in the violently beautiful landscape of Western Australia, his home ground, thick with memory and the challenge of ecological threat and political ineptitude. In the first cycle, Echoes and Refrains, the poets sought and found a language for this conversation of various modes and moods. They were linked by the political and social upheavals in their respective spheres – Dawes contemplating the waves of violence consuming the US and the world, and Kinsella confronting the injustice of the theft of indigenous land and the terrible treatment of refugees and immigrants. These poems chart an unpredictable journey towards friendship. They reflect commonalities – love of family, cricket, art, politics, music, and travel – and in poem after poem one senses how each is hungry to hear from the other and to then treat the revelations that arrive as triggers for his own lyric introspection – risky, complex, formally considered and beautiful. They stretch one another, and provoke to a poetic honesty that comes with authority and assurance. In the second cycle of poems, Illuminations, locations shift but the concerns remain and are considered in different lights. Speak from Here to There reminds us of how poetry can offer comfort and solace, and how it can ignite the peculiar creative frenzy that enriches us.

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Professor Mervyn Morris, Jamaica’s Poet Laureate writes: 'Ralph Thompson’s luminous autobiography is a fascinating portrait. A witty businessman and poet who studied in the United States and served as an Air Force lawyer in Japan, he writes vividly about family and his Jamaican formation, changes in racial climate, vicissitudes in business and public service; about painting, poetry, love and betrayals. Critical and self-critical, he is a man of conscience trying to understand.'Take My Word For It offers rich insights into the long and full life of one of one of Jamaica's finest poets who has also been at the heart of the island's economic and commercial development. There are moving and sometimes comic chapters of a pre-war boyhood in colonial Jamaica in a far from prosperous white and Catholic Jamaican family, the years spent at the Jesuit college of Fordham in the USA, and postwar service in the United States Airforce, serving in Japan. Thereafter Ralph Thompson tells the story of a life at the heart of Jamaica's development of tourism, capitalist modernity and the leadership of Seprod, one of the island's largest companies. There are fascinating glimpses of involvement with Jamaica's sharply divided political life -- between Michael Manley and Edward Seaga. But along with the businessman who can convey something of the excitement of commercial strategy and take-over bids, there is also the artist and poet who has explored the inner life, not least the position of a white man in a Jamaica whose decolonisation has been in part about discovering its black identity. Ralph Thompson has long had a passionate concern with the quality of the education on offer to all Jamaicans, and he writes with feeling about his contribution to the debate around educational issues and practical attempts to make improvements. There is also the loyal supporter of Derek Walcott's Trinidad Theatre Workshop who did much to bring that theatre to wider Caribbean and American notice, who writes about his friendship with Walcott with warmth and insight.Amply illustrated with photographs, images of Thompson's paintings and extracts from his poetry, Take My Word For It is a beautifully and frankly written record of a significant Jamaican life.Contains 19 illustrations/photographs, 12 in full colour.

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Winner of the 2016 OCM Bocas Prize for Non Fiction. Beginning with the promptings of the erotic title story, Jacqueline Bishop came to see the hybrid format of this book, with its mix of short stories, essays and interviews could begin to encompass her desire to see where she had arrived at in a creative career that encompassed being published as a novelist, poet, critic and exhibited as an artist. How did these sundry positions connect together? What aspects of both conscious intention and unconscious, interior motivations did they reveal?The stories, none more than a few pages long, can be read at several levels. The mentor who teaches the child gymnast a contortionist’s erotic positions, the adoptive mother who shoots down ex-partner and adopted child when the former debauches the latter as the subject of pornographic photographs; the relationship between tattooist and the woman who offers her naked body for decoration are all sharply and persuasively realized as short fictions, but they also hint at a writer’s interior dialogue and can be read as parables about the relationship between the free imagination and the controlling and even potentially betraying power of art.The essays explore more conscious areas of expression. They deal with the experiences of maternal separation, family histories and mythologies, the search for grounding in the life of a Jamaican grandmother, the relationship with a male writing mentor, travel to Morocco, the inspiration of the writing lives of Jamaicans Claude McKay and Roger Mais and how 9/11 showed her how deeply she had become a New Yorker.The interviews, which investigate sometimes her writing, sometimes her art, and occasionally both, provide context for the stories and the essays. They are at their most revealing when interviewers ask Jacqueline Bishop questions she hasn’t asked herself.

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Winner of the 2016 Governor General's Award and a NIFCA Gold! Leaving Atlantis is a suite of poems that explores the unstable territory between public and private. They are addressed to the great Barbadian novelist and thinker, George Lamming, the silent but speaking partner in a relationship of love that comes between two writers when “your flag is flying at half-mast”.Leaving Atlantis is a suite of poems that explores the unstable territory between public and private. They are addressed to the great Barbadian novelist and thinker, George Lamming, the silent but speaking partner in a relationship of love that comes between two writers when “your flag is flying at half-mast”. The suite works at multiple levels, as a record of the negotiation of feelings, permissions, exclusions and treaties between two persons who have to confront the reality of long lives that have accumulated “memories I cannot share”, and not least that the poet is a woman of deep religious faith, and the man a lifelong Marxist and non-believer. What the poems also deal with in a moving but resolutely unsentimental way is the fact that the age of one of the partners makes the temporal finiteness of the relationship a matter of acute awareness. What is the poet to think when she sees the man throwing out and putting his papers in order? “Clearing out?” The poems also meditate on the ironies of a relationship with a man who has both been public property as a writer and a leader of the struggle for Caribbean sovereignty, but also an intensely private person, habituated to a life of movement and temporariness. Quite literally, Leaving Atlantis references the moment when the writer is forced to leave, with a rude absence of notice, the hotel at Bathsheba on the Atlantic coast of Barbados, his refuge for many years. Is the relationship and provision of a home a “Coming Home”, the arrival at a place of rest after the turbulence of a life of struggle, or does it threaten a loss of autonomy after a life of privacy and independence? What of sovereignty now when “I am your dotage, your vulnerable/ season”? More than a portrait, fascinating and intimate as it is, of a public man; more than an exploration of the writing of the man for clues about what he might be thinking (and an acceptance of the ultimate mystery and unknowability of the intimate other), this is a suite of poems about the miracle of love, and how it may come at any time.

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Only when he is on board the steamer halfway to their remote destination up river in Guyana does Milton Woodsley realize that there is more to Henry Nevinson s invitation to spend time with his family in their jungle cottage. Milton, an artist, thinks he has been invited to do some paintings for Nevinson, a rich businessman. But when the Nevinsons mention a flute player that no one else can hear, Woodsley begins to glean that there is more to their stay. Told in Woodsley s skeptical, self-mocking and good-humored voice, Mittelholzer creates a brilliantly atmospheric setting for his characters and their terrified discovery that this is not a place where they can be at home."

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The title of Wife is both ironic and deeply serious. There are wittily sharp poems on the gender inequalities and potential prisons of marriage, that are in dialogue with poems that celebrate the physical joys of intimacy and poems that explore the processes of self-creation that take place in the closeness to the male other. Poems that are cutting about male self-deceptions and arrogations of power speak to poems that display a deep sensitivity to the aloneness of the embattled male psyche. This is not verse in the confessional mode, but poems that take on other voices, other histories and explore the relationship between experiences and the way we mythologise them. These spare, elegant poems are not only intensely body focused and attentive to the minutiae of domestic space, but that they make connections to the worlds of family, church, village and nation – and even, in a poem the references the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, to the soul. Their context is a Virgin Islands’ past, a Black American present, and an enlarged human future.

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St. Omer's last published novel reappears as part of the Caribbean Modern Classics collection.

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After years living in the heart of the American Empire, the dramatist and novelist Edgar Nkosi White returned to his native Monserrat, still essentially a colony as a British Overseas Territory. Deported to Paradise is a series of free-floating autobiographical and opinion pieces that traverse the contemporary landscape of global corporations and state repression, a world that offers consumerism as an illusion of freedom and choice. The essays, from the vantage point of the Caribbean, identify the consequences of rising inequalities of wealth and power and ask what is to be done. In the first place, there is to be no surrender to the world of drones and clones, wall-to-wall surveillance, corporations with more power than the nation state and churches that have become apologists for the Gospel of Prosperity. Though much of the Caribbean appears to have surrendered to the New World Order, White's essays take comfort from the fact that the mind is the only muscle capable of growth in any age and that it is still possible to live beneath a volcano in independence and grace. His descriptions of contemporary life on Monserrat bring its contradictions as a quasi colony vividly to life. Whether you agree or disagree with White's prophetic voice from the hills, these essays will engage the open-minded reader with their exuberant prose, freshness of vision and sardonic wit.

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What is at the heart of Cyril Dabydeen's poetry is an acute sense of geography as both space and time. It is a sense that begins in personal biography, of the writer born in Guyana, long settled in Canada and conscious of his ancestral connections to India. Place frequently provides the subject matter and the metaphorical threads that run through the collection. Poems are drawn to hinterlands and interiors both as actual places and as mental landscapes and as a metaphor for the interior life of the poem - frequently independent of the writer's conscious intentions. Poems investigate journeyings and borders that connect to the adventure of engaging with the otherness of encountered people. Poems celebrate identities that can never be other than as multi-layered as the places that shaped them. Cyril Dabydeen writes with lyric grace, but perhaps his most characteristic voice is conversational, often witty and amused in its sharing of experiences as diverse as the incidents of travel, cricket, and the absurd pretensions of the literary world. In these conversations with the reader, the poems make enlightening connections between ancient Greece and Amerindian myth in Guyana; the present and the buried voices of the past. In paying homage to the great Guyanese writer Wilson Harris, Cyril Dabydeen signals that he too is a rejector of absolutes, in search of multiple possibilities.

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Shaped over a period of twenty years, this is an elegantly written, scholarly but highly accessible, collection of essays that are essentially a map of how one of the Caribbean's most distinguished historians has sought to discover himself through practise of his craft. It covers new ground in Indo-Caribbean history primarily, but it also explores innovatively aspects of the intellectual legacy of four eminent Caribbean writers and thinkers: Guyanese poet, Martin Carter, Guyanese historian, Walter Rodney, Nobel laureate, V.S. Naipaul, and C.L.R. James, author of one of the great books of the 20th century, Beyond a Boundary (1963). Several of the pieces by Professor Seecharan, author of many books, including Sweetening 'Bitter Sugar': Jock Campbell, the Booker Reformer in British Guiana, 1934-66 (awarded the prestigious Elsa Goveia Prize in 2005 by the Association of Caribbean Historians), adopt a revisionist approach in revisiting the migration of indentured labourers from India to the Caribbean, between 1838 and 1917.He challenges many of the received assumptions on the subject; and he rejects that it was 'a new system of slavery'; that all the people were duped or kidnapped into indentureship; indeed, that the migrants had no agency in the process. He counters that the reverse was invariably the case, documenting that most women and men dared to travel alone, fleeing a life of utter despair in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in India to greater social freedom and a modicum of material success - flight to Guyana and Trinidad could therefore be considered, in most cases, an escape to freedom. Seecharan's essays demonstrate that the struggles on the plantations notwithstanding, Indians in Guyana gradually shaped a new persona of hope, rising quietly but confidently from the death of caste prejudice; thriving on the fruits of their new, vastly more open, environment with the making of communities rooted in rice, cattle and retail trade; maximizing the benefits of education while claiming the legacy of 'many Indias', part fact, part fiction, in advancing their civil and political rights in Guyana.Within this complex mix are located several Indo-Guyanese personalities, such as Joseph Ruhomon, a pioneer intellectual; Cheddi Jagan and Balram Singh Rai, politicians of contrasting visions; and the unsung cricketer, Ivan Madray. In the process, Seecharan finds not only himself, but he locates a rich narrative vein, illuminating a vital aspect of Caribbean life.

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A new novel from a classic St. Lucian author, Prismns re-affirms St. Omer's leading status.

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"Jane King" is very much present in these poems, though never in obvious autobiographical ways. She is the observant eye taking in the beauties and droughts, climatic and human, she sees in St Lucia and in the semi-public lives of her neighbours. Hers is also the inward eye that plumbs dream states, the unconscious and the alarming darkness that the free-floating imagination sometimes reaches. If the poems selected from her previous collections, In to the Centre and Fellow Traveller have a greater focus on the absurdities of race, the traps of history and the dread context of Caribbean postcolonial politics in the 1980s and early 90s, and witty acidic poems on gender and male betrayal, Performance Anxiety takes further those signs in the earlier collections that Jane King is a distinctively original explorer of the inner person, and of the world on the margins of perception. In the new poems, organised around the metaphors of spectacle, performance and vulnerability, there is a reaching for a vision that offers some map to being "lost in this strange century". This is sought in the dialectics of birth and death and in remembering the vision of the child "innocent as clay" in the midst of adult despairs. Not least is vision sought in the making of the poem itself, the "frail boat" that if built wrong, surrenders to the sea, but whose risky venturing may lead to clarity. As the tree teaches in the poem "The Performer Gains Some Comfort from a Tree", it is "what's softest, most vulnerable [that] conquers drought".Jane King Hippolyte was born in St Lucia. She was educated in Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, St Lucia and Scotland. She was awarded an MA in Literary Studies at Deakin University, Australia.She has worked as a secondary teacher in Scotland and St Lucia, then as a senior lecturer in English at the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College in St Lucia where she is currently Dean of the Division of Arts, Science and General Studies. She has also been an assistant chief examiner for CAPE Literatures in English, and has served as a judge and chairperson for the Commonwealth Writers Prize.She was awarded Witter Bynner and James Michener fellowships at Yaddo, New York, and the University of Miami respectively. She was awarded the Minvielle & Chastanet Fine Arts Award for Poetry in 1990 and the James Rodway Memorial Prize, awarded by Derek Walcott for Fellow Traveller in 1994.She has a number of acting and directing credits in theatre and was a founding director of the Lighthouse Theatre Company, St Lucia. She has been active in community service.Her previous publications are In to the Centre (1993) and Fellow Traveller (1994) and her work has appeared in numerous journals and is widely anthologised.

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When Kei Miller describes these as essays and prophecies, he shares with the reader a sensibility in which the sacred and the secular, belief and scepticism, and vision and analysis engage in profound and lively debate. Two moments shape the space in which these essays take place. He writes about the occasion when as a youth who was a favoured spiritual leader in his charismatic church he found himself listening to the rhetoric of the sermons for their careful craft of prophecy; but when he writes about losing his religion, he recognises that a way of being and seeing in the world lives on - a sense of wonder, of spiritual empowerment and the conviction that the world cannot be understood, or accepted, without embracing visions that challenge the way it appears to be.

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This is a second, significantly revised, edition of the work of Eric Roach, who with Claude McKay and Louise Bennett was the Caribbean's most important poet before the generation of Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite. It collects the poems published in literary journals between 1938-1973, Roach's early pseudonymous work and a substantial selection of his unpublished poems from manuscript. The collection is edited and introduced by Kenneth Ramchand, Professor Emeritus at the University of the West Indies.When the first edition appeared in 1992, it was recognised as one of the most important Caribbean publishing events of recent years. This second edition adds a number of rediscovered poems and includes significant variants of a number of Roach's most important poems."The most splendid voice of the Caribbean Renaissance (1948-1972)."Kamau BrathwaiteEric Merton Roach was born in 1915 in Tobago. As well as three plays – Belle Fanto (1967), Letter from Leonora (1968) and A Calabash of Blood (1971) – he accumulated an impressive body of poetry. In 1974, leaving behind 'Finis', a suicide note transformed into art, Roach drank insecticide and swam out to sea at Quinam Bay, itself the subject of his fine poem 'At Quinam Bay'. He was posthumously awarded the Trinidad and Tobago National Hummingbird Gold Medal in 1974.

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Ann-Margaret Lim's poetry is alert to all the contradictions of contemporary Jamaica. There are lyric and delicate poems that find fresh things to say about its land and seascapes, and its novelties as discovered by her child. These appear alongside pungent, arresting poems in response to the endemic violence, misogyny and poverty of a divided society.Lim writes in both Caribbean English and Jamaican patois, reflecting on her Chinese and African heritage, and on shaping experiences, good and bad. Hers is a feisty, questioning persona, charged with wit, an imaginative eye for revealing detail, and the warmth of celebration.Ann-Margaret Lim was born in 1976 and lives in Red Hills, Jamaica. She has been published in journals (including the Caribbean Writer and NYU's Calabash), anthologies and her country's two major newspapers, the Gleaner and the Observer. She has a BA in English Literature and has benefitted from workshops conducted by Wayne Brown, Mervyn Morris and Kwame Dawes, as well as the poetry of such greats as Derek Walcott.

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Written by his daughter, Evelyn A. Williams, The Art of Denis Williams is a long-overdue illustrated guide to the work of a man praised worldwide, including by the likes of Wyndham Lewis, Henry Moore and Salvador Dali. In the 1940s, Denis Williams was the first Black artist to win critical acclaim in Britain and the first Black teacher at both the Central School of Art and Crafts and the Slade School of Fine Art in London. His presence was of such significance to art in the post-war era that it was reserved by the Tate and featured in Time Magazine.Includes 69 colour and 80 black-and-white illustrations.Evelyn A. Williams was born in London, and is a researcher, painter and writer born in London. She co-edited the recently published Denis Williams: A Life in Works, New and Collected Essays (2010), with contributions from leading scholars, including a number of Williams' contemporaries such as Wilson Harris and Stanley Greaves. She currently lives in Edinburgh, and has studios both in Scotland and Guyana.

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Keith Jardim is an assistant professor of English literature and creative writing at Gulf University for Science and Technology in Kuwait. His stories have appeared in numerous publications, including the "Denver Quarterly," the "Journal of Caribbean Literatures," "Tell Tales 4: The Global Village," and "Trinidad & Tobago Review."

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"This is a marvellous collection filled with a lovely and evocative music. Highly recommended."Library ReviewSince the publication of her first collection, The Water Between Us, Shara McCallum has steadily created a rich body of poems, mining the rich deposit of emotional and intellectual capital in her background of multiple migrations. Her work has explored what it means to emerge from childhood in a Rastafarian home filled with reckless idealism and enter a new world of American landscapes and values.The Face of Water collects some of her best poems, poems that establish her as a poet of deft craft, and craftiness. She manages in these poems to enact the grand alchemy of the best poems – the art of transforming the most painful and sometimes mundane details of life into works of terrible and satisfying beauty. Shara McCallum hails from Kingston, Jamaica. She is the author of three collections of poetry: This Strange Land, Song of Thieves, and The Water Between Us, winner of the 1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Her poems have been several times nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and in 2011 she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. She teaches and directs the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.

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"Without losing the joy of play or the play of the rhythms, Dub Wise celebrates the burdens and delights of love, friendships and the responsibility of being at home in the world. Geoffrey Philp's new book is witty, playful, gracious and, yes, wise. An enjoyable read from beginning to end." Olive SeniorGeoffrey Philp was born in Jamaica. He now lives and works in Miami. He maintains a blog @ geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com

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Using the power of language to explore and discover patterns of meaning, this stunning and ambitious collection brings the lyric poem face to face with the external world, with its politics, social upheavals, and ideological complexity. Whether it is a poem about a near victim of the Lockerbie bombing reflecting on the nature of grace, a president considering the function of art, or a Rastafarian defending his faith, the selections all seek illumination and understanding in the world. Using images from Garcia Marquez's novels, accounts of slave rebellions, passages from the Book of Ezekiel, the art of modernist painters and wall-to-wall news coverage, Dawes creates a striking series of poems that are about finding pathways of meaning, and the quest for love and faith.Kwame Dawes was born in Ghana in 1962 but grew up in Jamaica. He is widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of the post-Walcott generation. A poet, actor, editor, critic, musician and professor of English, he is the author of 17 books. He was awarded a Pushcart Prize for Poetry in 2001. His poetry collections include Progeny of Air (Peepal Tree, 1994), winner of the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, Shook Foil: A Collection of Reggae Poetry (Peepal Tree, 1997) and Map-Maker (Smith/Doorstop, 2000), winner of the The Poetry Business Prize. His New and Selected Poems, 1994-2002 was published by Peepal Tree in 2002. He recently edited the acclaimed anthology Red: Contemporary Black British Poetry (Peepal Tree, 2010).

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The Wild Coast is a novel about how Guyanese might come to terms with living in Guyana. Carew portrays a country in which the echoes of slavery still disturb, with seemingly irreconcilable conflicts between its diverse cultural inheritances, and which is struggling to feel at home in a world where nature, away from the coastal strip and the city, appears inhospitable and wild.These are the challenges that confront Hector Bradshaw when, as a sickly child, he is sent away to the remote village of Tarlogie. Here he receives an education that he struggles to fit together: the dry colonial education of the tragic Teacher La Rose; the moral precepts of his kindly guardian, Sister Smart; the harsh African vision of the old hunter Doorne; and the sexual education he receives from Elsa. Above all, for a sickly city boy, there is the challenge of wild nature, disturbingly red in tooth and claw.Jan Carew was born in the village of Agricola in Berbice, Guyana in 1920.

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Bending and manipulating the linear narrative structures of conventional fiction, this stark and brutal novel--originally published in 1953--is a powerful reflection on colonial Jamaica and the condition of the urban poor, told through the voices and stories of several boldly drawn characters. Beginning with Surjue, a man arrested and imprisoned following a botched robbery, who struggles for survival within Jamaica's colonial prison, this tale bears an unflinching and distressing realism that combines poetic spirit, tragic vision, and prophetic rage, while offering an acute look at the reality the poor in 1950s Jamaica.

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When Teresa Craddock joins her brother Tommy on an island that is and isn't Dominica, she is in flight from life and the death of her fiancé. On the island she finds a congenial new home and rediscovers a zest for life. Indeed, when Derek Morell, the new owner of an old estate, signals an unmistakeable interest in her, Teresa is more than ready for an adventure, despite the inconvenient fact that Morell is married. But what seems to begin as a witty account of romance in a tropical setting reveals itself to be an important 'lost' work in Caribbean fiction, parallel to the work of Phyllis Allfrey and Jean Rhys. Ultimately, A Flying Fish Whispered becomes a deeply imaginative exploration of different kinds of Caribbeans.Introduction by Evelyn O'Callaghan.Elma Napier was born in Scotland in 1892 and settled in with her family at Calibishie, Dominica in 1932. She quickly became a leading literary and political personality on the island, and in 1940 became the first woman ever to be elected to a Caribbean legislature. Apart from two autobiographies, Youth is a Blunder and Winter in July, she wrote a further novel with a Dominican setting, Duet in Discord, also under the pen name of Elizabeth Garner. She died in Dominica in 1973.

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Shortlisted for the Guyana Prize for Literature 2011.These poems written over the past thirty years, but most of them recently, have as their focal point an act of homage to the great Guyanese poet Martin Carter, voice of a nation. They celebrate a friendship and an example of vision and integrity, and bear witness to Carter's role as the nation's conscience in Guyana's continuing agony of disputed elections and ethnic divisions. Dense and jewelled, the poems also investigate the numinous power of words and the necessity and sanctity of the act of making. With half a dozen striking line drawings, these poems create a surreal twist on the everyday and reveal a profound artist's ecological vision of the relationship between the senses and the correspondences between man and the natural world. The poems are quirky, philosophically enquiring but have the concreteness of thought rising like 'pond-bottom bubbles'.Stanley Greaves was born in Guyana. He is one of the Caribbean's most distinguished artists and an accomplished classical guitarist. He currently lives in Barbados.

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These poems by Millicent Graham have a compactness and economy that belies the complex and expansive range of emotions and considerations that occupy her imagination. Graham's poems offer us a way to see her distinctly contemporary and urban Jamaica through the slant eye of a surrealist, one willing to see the absurdities and contradictions inherent in the society that preoccupies her. These are poems about family, about love, about spirituality, about fear and mostly about desire, where the dampness of things is as much about the humid sensuality of this woman's island, as it is about her constant belief in fecundity, fertility and the unruliness of the imagination. For a poet publishing her first collection, Graham's sense of irony, and instinct for surprise and freshness in image are remarkably mature and sophisticated. But it is the sharpness of image and the precision in her use of language that announce the arrival of an extremely talented poet: 'I am the curve set straight/ by a guava switch, the proof/ that love can make you flinch.' Graham knows the tradition of Caribbean poetry, and is deeply aware of the value of both homage and resistance. The result is a wonderfully executed balancing act that ultimately suggests a newness of sensibility and imagination. In The Damp in Things, we are invited into the unique imagination of Millicent Graham, and we find ourselves in a world of psychological density and liveliness, and a space of sharply honed intelligence that remains strangely light and alert because of her slanting wit and off-kilter humour.Millicent A. A. Graham was born 1974 in Kingston, Jamaica. She has recently been published in City Lighthouse Poetry Anthology 2009; Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts and Letters, Vol 5 No 1, 2008 and The Caribbean Writer Vol. 17.

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Winner of the Guyana Prize Caribbean Award 2011 (Poetry).This is an immensely ambitious collection of poems, the fruit of more than a dozen years' work since the publication of Mark McWatt's Guyana prize-winning collection The Language of Eldorado in 1994 (his first collection Interiors won the Commonwealth Poetry prize in 1989). Strands of autobiography, a deeply sensuous ecology of place, historical narratives; the inner world of imagination and the often difficult realities of the postcolonial nation are interwoven in the collection's bold but carefully worked out architecture.The four parts of the book represent at one level linear phases of a life: childhood; adolescence and young manhood; maturity and the first intimations of ageing. Within each section there is an intersecting narrative sequence that sometimes complements, sometimes expands and sometimes run counter to the 'personal' narratives. In 'Mercator', poems in the voice of a nameless Elizabethan sea captain searching for Eldorado intertwine with semi-autobiographical poems about a boy's discovery of self and world in the remote northwest district of Guyana. In 'The Dark Constellation', poems about love and awakening sexuality are connected to a series of poems about Guyana's vast and powerful rivers. 'The Museum of Love' features a wholly imaginative narrative about the restless spirit of a young black boy, murdered by a plantation manager, who inhabits a sculpture in a museum and with his ragamuffin followers wreaks havoc on the works of art during the night. This is intercut with a sequence of poems on the theme of independence in life and politics, poems that reflect on the contrary impulses of creation and destruction. The final section 'Le Repentir' (which is the name of the main cemetery in Georgetown), explores a historical (and true) story of an accidental fratricide and the themes of guilt and expiation. This narrative connects to poems about mid-life and thoughts about old age and death.Mark McWatt is the recently retired Professor of West Indian literature at UWI, Cave Hill. He is joint editor of the Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse(2005).

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Drama critic Lance Yardley is only 30 but is already a seedy wreck of a man, spending his nights in the back streets of Coventry looking for prostitutes. A working-class boy brought up in a broken home on a council estate, he has sought escape in literature and through his marriage to an actress, the great-granddaughter of a 19th-century Englishman who made his fortune from the sugar plantations in Guyana. At first Elizabeth attracts Yardley, but their differences of class exacerbate the mutual hatred that grows between them. Later he is drawn to a mysterious Indian girl, Rohini. She seems shy, but sells her body to customers when her boss goes out of town. When she dies suddenly, the victim of a strange and violent assassin, Yardley decides to decamp abroad for a while. He goes to Guyana, not least because he wants to learn more about an Irish priest who as an old man has been a priest in Coventry, but as a young man had worked as a missionary in Guyana. The priest's fragmented journals seem to offer Yardley some possible answers to his own spiritual malaise, but the Guyana he discovers provokes more questions than answers.David Dabydeen was born in Guyana. He has published six acclaimed novels and three collections of poetry. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.

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Seni Seneviratne's debut collection offers a poetic landscape that echoes themes of migration, family, love and loss and reflects her personal journey as a woman of Sri Lankan and English heritage.The poems cross oceans and centuries. In 'Cinnamon Roots' Seni Seneviratne travels from colonial Britain to Ceylon in the 15th century and back to Yorkshire in the 20th Century; in 'A Wider View' time collapses and carries her from a 21st century Leeds back to the flax mills of the 19th century; poems like 'Grandad's Insulin', based on childhood memories, place her in 1950's Yorkshire but echo links with her Sri Lankan heritage."Loss, love, memory, from Yorkshire to Sri Lanka and back, Seni Seneviratne's poems delve in and out of a complex history. These tender, moving poems weave a delicate web." Jackie KaySeni Seneviratne is a writer, singer, photographer and performer. She was born in Leeds, Yorkshire in 1951 to an English mother and Sri Lankan father. She has been writing poetry since her early teens and was first published in 1989.

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"Fauna" is not just a collection of individually rewarding poems but a carefully structured whole. Using metaphors drawn from the fauna and flora of Jamaica and images drawn from painting as the over-arching devices, Bishop explores the tensions between plenitude and emptiness, presence and absence, the nourishing and the poisonous in her memories of the rural Jamaican childhood that has shaped her. There is the lushness of scene, but also the way that 'the smell of mango' will always be associated with childhood trauma, or the richness of avocado contrasted with the allamanda who admits, 'Everything alive develops a defence...Mine is poison; all parts of me are toxic'. There are imagined scenes that are highly focused and there are the blurred images of the father who is always at the edge of the photograph. And from the perspective of New York, Bishop sees herself as another kind of fauna, the Jamaican birds who can be found everywhere. 'In North America three or four species/have been identified from the peculiar way they sing.' This is a moving and heart-felt collection, but Bishop never allows the siren voice of longing for return to become sentimental. Always there is the drive towards the artist's desire to remake the world and to work meticulously at what can be left in, what must be taken out.

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In "After-image", Dennis Scott displays in ever more refined, pared-down ways the qualities that, in his previous collections, established him as a major Caribbean poet. There is his acute intelligence, seriousness worn lightly, and meticulous craft with sound and the appearance of the poem on the page. There is his resolute integrity as a Black and Caribbean poet with a sense of multiple inheritances who refuses to be conscripted into any sentimental or monolithic stance, who goes 'among the fashionable drums/trying to keep true my own blood's subtle beat'. There is the warm humanity of his poems about love and the nourishment of his marriage. There is his actor's ability to get under the skin of those he observes, to see 'so many tales/ in every silent face', his sense of the masks and rituals, the significance of tiny movements in the interactions between people. Particularly arresting in "After-image", poems drawn from the wealth of manuscripts left by Scott after his untimely death in 1991, and edited by his friend and fellow poet, Mervyn Morris, are those that focus on his own coming death, his hope/confidence that 'when this machine is dead/ the poems it made will flare/ wild...' These are poems vibrant with life, with curiosity about this new journey, 'a certain satisfaction from/ questions articulated', poems of an inspiring courage. Though the world becomes confined to a ward, a body, a tirelessly curious mind, there is no sense of diminution when a vase of flowers on a hospital table brings him 'The surprise of wild flowers!/ Walls fall open, roofs melt/ I too grow upwards.' There are the pleasures of travelling light, 'A small bird, bearing/ news from the front', and the pangs and consolations of not knowing what is to come. He sees the bird that 'shits on my neat/ green/ garden// I do not know/ what will grow', but he also draws peace from the sense of continuation when he watches the ocean and thinks 'Let the sea repeat/ unwatched, its long, salt hymn.' And, there is his poet's wit writing about death the editor in the last poem in the collection, the last two lines left artfully incomplete, of waiting on 'that blue hand that/ could be here, now'.

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Carib's Leap brings together work from a dozen previous collections, and major new poems including those on the Big Drum Dance of Carriacou, poems that are alight with almost forty years of imaginative involvement with the Caribbean.Laurence Lieberman is an American poet with deep Caribbean affiliations. He has published twelve collections of poetry and three volumes of literary essays.

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Earl McKenzie was born in rural Mount Charles, St. Andrew Jamaica in 1943. He attended Oberlin High School and Mico Teachers College. Then he lived for some years in the USA and Canada where he obtained a BA and MFA from Columbia University and a Ph D from the University of British Columbia. In Jamaica he taught in several high schools and at Church Teachers College. He currently lectures in Philosophy at the University of the West Indies, Mona. In addition to his poetry in 'Against Linearity' (Peepal Tree, 1993), he is the author of the novel, 'A Boy Named Ossie: A Jamaican Childhood' (Heinemann, 1991) and 'Two Roads to Mount Joyful & Other Stories' (Longman, 1992). His work has appeared in the following anthologies: 'Caribbean New Wave'; 'The Faber Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories' and 'Perspectives'.

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Delores Gauntlett's poems give a real sense of what it means to be a contemporary Jamaican in 'this hard country', a land 'spinning on the edge of nerves', where 'shocking news is the norm'. Mostly alluded to, this Jamaica of dread is directly approached in a number of poems: a brother held at gunpoint, where it is the mental wounds that sap , or in the careful euphemisms of describing the mother unable 'to rise from the day/of her son's affliction at the boot of authority'. Her collection also bears witness to what enables Jamaicans to endure, the ties of love, friendship and family, though here too she writes without sentimentality of the prisons that people make for themselves and the fragility of such ties. But Gauntlett is much more than a reporter of tribulations. Hers is a concern with 'the code-breaking edge of thought', with the capacity of the poem to get inside the 'thisness' of being, to demand reflectiveness as 'each phrase's after-image/ trails in the mind to be later held to the light', or to return down old lanes with new understandings.Delores Gauntlett is Jamaican. Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and journals including [i]The Caribbean Writer[/i], [i]Poetry News[/i], [i]Kunapipi[/i], [i]The Observer Literary Arts[/i], and [i]The Jamaica Journal[/i].

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A group of sixth formers vandalize an exclusive Georgetown club on the day of their school leaving, coincidentally also the day of their country's independence. Several of their parents think a lesson is in order and the semblance of a trial is organized. The sentences they are given are suspended provided that they fulfil the task set by their English teacher, who has interceded on their behalf. Each must write a short story that says something about the newly independent Guyana. Years later, Mark McWatt, one of the group, is handed the papers of his old school friend, Victor Nunes, who has disappeared, feared drowned, in the Guyanese interior. The papers contain some of the stories, written before the project collapsed when the group realized the trial was a hoax. As a tribute to Victor Nunes, McWatt decides to collect the rest of the stories from his friends. "Suspended Sentences" is a tour-de-force of invention. The stories, entertaining in their own right, whether supposedly written by eighteen year olds or in later adult life, work not only like Chaucerian tales to reveal their teller, but have an affectionately satirical take on the nature of Guyanese fiction making. By ranging across Guyanese ethnicities, gender and time in the purported authorship of these stories, McWatt creates a richly dialogic work of fiction. And when McWatt apparently slips some of his own biography into a brilliantly comic story of betrayal (that ends in the victim's suicide), but told by another member of the group, the implications of the collection's subtitle, 'Fictions of atonement' become teasingly ambiguous.

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Based on the experiences of a lecture and reading tour in South Africa, these poems deal with the state of a society just unfreezing from apartheid, but in indirect ways which illuminate by their obliqueness."The poems deal with that landscape, each one like a sharply etched woodcut, ranging from a fine tribute to a poet caught 'under the strong shaft of the Johannesburg sun' of this politically volcanic city, to a 'frozen image' of sacred ibises in Durban's Botanical Garden. None of his poems is tendentious, but each is tense with quiet intensity."Mario Relich, Lines ReviewSudeep Sen lives and works in New Delhi & London. He is the editorial director of AARK ARTS.

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With engaging illustrations by Paul Harris, Janet Jagan's first collection of children's stories has tales of animals, of Guyanese children, Amerindian legend, and the title story which recounts the rural childhood of her husband, then the President of Guyana."It is a very positive document as reading material for children and its appearance is made infinitely more important because of the literary wasteland that so many Guyanese have inherited where the habit and value of reading became alien to many local children... The author has a consistently clear, confident, neat and mature style in her narration which the most discriminating reader will appreciate. This is fortified by her talent for crisp and lively dialogue even where plots are slight... the very moving story of "Kathy and the Ring" is one of the most memorable in the book, which is effectively illustrated by Paul Harris who never fails to capture the correct expressions and give life and character to the various animals."Al CreightonJanet Jagan has served Guyana for over fifty years as a politician and as editor of The Mirror newspaper. She was the first woman President of Guyana.

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Cyril Dabydeen brings a poet's vision to these stories which span the crossing between the Caribbean and North America. They have a surface of gritty realism, but move inwards to explore the hidden dreams and latent capacities of his characters. Whether in the unsettling landscapes of rural Berbice in Guyana (with its ferocious crocodiles and even a spliff-toting Rasta), the wilderness of the Canadian North, or the urban melting pot of Toronto, Dabydeen's characters are memorably alert to what makes them feel either at home or alien in their various landscapes. Ranging from the extremely funny to the tragic, these stories are full of poetry, tension and sometimes terror. Cyril Dabydeen involves the reader creatively in a world of shifting grounds.Cyril Dabydeen was born in Guyana in 1945. He migrated to Canada in 1970. He is the author of almost a dozen collections of poetry, two novels and six collections of short stories.

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