Search results for ""Peepal Tree Press Ltd""

Comparing herself to a douen, a mythical being from the Trinidadian forests whose head and feet face in different directions, Jennifer Rahim's poems explore states of uncertainty both as sources of discomfort and of creative possibility.The poems explore a Trinidad finely balanced between the forces of rapid urbanisation and the constantly encroaching green chaos of tropical bush, whose turbulence regularly threatens a fragile social order, and whose people, as the descendants of slaves and indentured labourers, are acutely resistant to any threat to clip their wings and fence them in.In her own life, Rahim explores the contrary urges to a neat security and to an unfettered sense of freedom and her attraction to the forest 'where tallness is not the neighbour's fences/ and bigness is not the swollen houses/ that swallow us all'. It is, though, a place where the bushplanter 'seeing me grow branches/ draws out his cutting steel and slashes my feet/ since girls can never become trees'.Jennifer Rahim is Trinidadian. She also writes short fiction and criticism. She is currently Senior Lecturer at The Liberal Arts Department, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad.

Read more less

When the guitars tickle a bedrock of drum and bass, when the girl a shock out and a steady hand curve round her sweat-smooth waist, when the smell of Charlie mingles with the chemicals of her hair and the groove is of the sweetest friction - how is a young man to keep his way pure?Kwame Dawes's poetry rises to new heights in these psalms of confession and celebrations of reggae's power to prophesy, to seek after righteousness and seduce the body and mind. Here is poetry walking the bassline, which darts sweetly around the rigid lick of the rhythm guitar yet expresses all the sadness and alienation at the heart of reggae. This, for Dawes, is the earth which 'never tells me my true home' and where behind every chekeh of the guitar there is the ancestral memory of the whip's crack. Shook Foil dramatises the conflict between the purity of essences and the taints of the actual, not least in the poems which focus on Bob Marley's life. Here is the rhygin, word-weaving prophet and the philanderer with the desperate hunger for yard pumpum, the revealer of truths and the buffalo soldier who has married yard with show biz affluence. Above all there is the intense sadness of Marley's death, for how can one live without the duppy conqueror's defiant wail in an island gone dark for the passing of his song?But for Shook Foil there is always the gospeller's hope that the dead will rise from dub ruins and patch a new quilt of sound for the feet to prance on. And when the high hat shimmering and the bass drum thumping, what else to do but dance?"Throughout the collection, Dawes captures the many dimensions of reggae from the psalmic to the prophetic that are yet to be explored by other writers and musicians. Reggae remains unparalleled in its ability to absorb other influences and remain true to itself and to capture beauty, pain, and pleasure in a one-drop riddim. Its syncopation suggests a break, a gap - somewhere to fall with the faith that you will be caught - and this is what gives reggae its redemptive value. To really enjoy the music, you must believe. The same could be said of Shook Foil."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.

Read more less

Poor sower of seeds with a gift for dreaming, Jacko Jacobus knows that his destiny is to found a people to shake the nations. But when he has to flee Jamaica to escape his brother's wrath, he finds himself pushing crack for his Uncle Al in South Carolina. In writing his dub version of the myth of Jacob and Esau, Kwame Dawes builds on a gripping narrative of prophecy, love, deceit and murder to address contemporary Caribbean realities; and in portraying the conflict between Jacko's trickster, anancy inventiveness and the narrow righteousness of his brother Eric's path, he explores the universal tensions between Jacko's sense of duty as the chosen instrument of God, and his desire to make his own way, whatever the consequences.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.

Read more less

Time Cleaves Itself by Jeda Pearl is a sonic meditation on memory, grief, disability, race, empathy and resilience from a Scottish womanof colour navigating belonging and claiming space.

Read more less

John Robert Lee’s Christian faith is always present in his perceptions of experience and in the shaping of his art, and even those who don’t share his faith should be grateful for this because he gives us a poetry of an empathetic sensitivity to human frailty, celebrations of the beauty of enduring love, prophetic anger in calling out injustices and a sense of the sacredness of the natural world and the terrible insults we offer it. It's a magnificent and varied collection in which different kinds of voices -- all JRL -- mesh together: the observational, the sacramental, the elegiac, the prophetic and the personal. It’s a collection in which four major suites of poems give the whole an organic unity, which is not to say that the individual poems that fall outside the suites don't make their fine contribution. The ‘Belmont Portfolio’, dedicated to Earl Lovelace, records a time spent on his own in the unfamiliar streets of Belmont in Trinidad in poems that catch the sense of being on the edge of adventure, that see the numinous behind the ordinary. The ‘Office Hours’ suite, with its gracious nods to W.H. Auden, is both an engagement with the hours of divine office and the Bible readings that go with it, and a very human series of reflections on that most universal of experiences – how we live through our diurnal cycles. There is the rousing, prophetic, Old Testament righteous anger of the ‘Watchman’ sequence, which reflects on the hell of living in Babylon and the gap between the deceits of ‘liberal democracies’ and the ghastly realities of their global crimes. In the last sequence, ‘What Remains to be Said’ the poet emerges to the front of the stage and speaks directly and confidentially to the reader. It is a sequence that gathers together what must be treasured as sustenance through ‘this Purgatorio’ of our times, reflections on how one can speak in an era where you are “collared in faith in agnostic seasons”, where the frequency of the deaths of those with whom you have shared the struggle is a “haunting against my faith in the Tree of Life” – and a wondering, slightly tongue-in-cheek: “approaching mid-seventies, what do I know?”

Read more less

Volume 2 takes the story of Black Music Britain from the mid-1960s to the 1990s

Read more less

It is 1963, one year after Independence, and Trinidadians are beginning to wonder what they can expect. Anna takes a temporary post at a remote post office in a small coastal town, hoping to escape a failed relationship, and the drama, pressures and politics of her city life. But neither time or space is granted, as the life of Macaima passes through the post office, and Anna reluctantly begins to take on the villagers' stories - which prove to be just as complicated and enmeshed in the social, cultural and political issues that divide the nation as her own. Long before the year is up, Anna has been immersed in an intense seasoning in Macaima that will change her for ever. Macaima is a magical place of intense and unforgettable characters, which Jennifer Rahim draws with exceptional psychological subtlety. And Anna herself - flawed, a little prickly and sometimes too ready to jump to conclusions - is a complex narrator whom we ultimately trust and care for. As an historical novel it asks probing questions about the nature of the means and ends of the project of Independence and its failures with respect to race, class, gender and sexuality. Goodbye Bay is simply one of the very best Caribbean novels to have been written, and not just in recent years. Written in a seamless mix of sharply observed realism with moments of rich humour, and of numinous poetic intensity, it tells a gripping story with room for surprise, humour, tragedy and redemption.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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

Read more less

'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.

Read more less

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”.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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

Read more less

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.”

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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."

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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

Read more less

"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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

Daughters of Empire is a sweeping family saga bound by the themes of family, migration and culture clash. At its heart is a tale of two sisters: Ishani, who stays in Trinidad with the family business, and Amira who emigrates to England. Ishani is a richly comic creation: a good-hearted manipulator determined to keep a grasp on her younger sister across the seas. Soul-searching Amira, however, wonders how she will raise three daughters away from home, and how a traditional Hindu upbringing will clash with the seductions of British individualism. And as she soon discovers, daughters of empire – even those with the very best educations – may never quite fit in, especially with those who see only colour. "Powerful and poetic" – Time Out. Lakshmi Persaud was born in 1939 in Trinidad. She studied at Queen's University, Belfast, and later at Reading University. She has lived mainly in the UK since the 1970s. Her novels are Butterfly in the Wind (Peepal Tree, 1990), Sastra (Peepal Tree, 1993), For the Love of My Name (Peepal Tree, 2000) and Raise the Lanterns High (2004).

Read more less

"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.

Read more less

Hurricane is the gripping story of a natural disaster and the thirteen year-old Kingston boy who lives to tell the tale.Holed up in their home, Joe Brown, his sister Mary and their parents wait for the eye of the hurricane to pass over them. Outside, a terrifying wind turns trees to splinters, darkness swallows the land and torrential rains lash the roof.Inside it is warm, dry, a home. A family huddled together for survival. But the storm hasn't passed yet, and all Joe and his family can do is worry, and wait, and hope.Praise for the original 1960s edition:"Strongly recommended." The School LibrarianHurricane was awarded the German Children's Book Prize 1967.

Read more less

"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

Read more less

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).

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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).

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less