Search results for ""Author Anthony Kellman""

Barbadian-born Alphonso Hutson has lived in the USA for nearly sixteen years. But he cannot settle. He has dragged his long-suffering American wife, Simone, and their children from house to rented house. He has refused to share with her any real explanation for the complex feelings that drive him. But this time she has had enough of his 'sorry restlessness', refuses to move with him and threatens the end of their marriage. Only then is Alphonso forced into confronting the ghosts that propel his perpetual migrancy.The ghosts lie in his native Barbados. There is the love, shame and guilt he feels for the dead parents whose funerals he failed to attend, and there is the mystery of the brother he has never seen, hidden away in an institution. All is complicated by his mixed feelings for his homeland. It is the place that still feeds his imagination, but as a boy from a Black working class family he has felt excluded from the class structures of a country still dominated by a privileged White minority. There is also the family house, locked up and at risk of being vandalised and Alphonso finally recognises that he cannot put off making a return, the first since his departure. In what follows Kellman combines a poetic and imaginative exploration of Alphonso's personal journey into his past, with an acute engagement with racial and political issues as he rediscovers his country in the midst of turmoil as the old order is challenged.Anthony Kellman was born in Barbados. He currently teaches at Augusta College, Georgia.

Read more less

Percival Veer has risen to the tenth floor of the Federal Bank of Charouga, has acquired a large and imposing house and a young and attentive wife. But satisfaction eludes him. Guilt over a past wrong begins to trouble him and a recurrent dream of caves disturbs his sleep. As Percy's inner world crumbles, he is gripped by an obsessive desire to explore the deep limestone caves of his island, dimly remembered from his boyhood. This gripping, poetic novel charts Percy's meeting with his spiritual guide, Cane Arrow and his hallucinatory descent into the cave's depths.Percival Veer's journey through the caves is not only a journey to truths that lie within him, but a journey to a vision of 'Creole magic': 'worlds of possibilities, coalescing visions and revisions of races and their juxtapositions.' This vision contrasts sharply with the cynical and pragmatic world of ethnic politics which has been his corrupting environment as a career bureaucrat."Realistic and dreamlike, explicit and mysterious... The descriptions are evocative and sensual. A compelling read." Carole Klein"A realistic and convincing portrait of self-loathing." Wilson HarrisAnthony Kellman was born in Barbados. He currently teaches at Augusta College, Georgia.

Read more less

In response to Anthony Kellman's first collection of poems, In Depths of Burning Light, Kamau Brathwaite wrote of being "startled and excited by his original vision." Of Watercourse, the celebrated Martiniquan poet and novelist Edouard Glissant wrote: "Watercourse is more than a collection of poems. It is the continual amazement evoked by Caribbean landscape: a single dialogue between the sea and the land... a song whose dazzling waves foam among the islands... Anthony Kellman's poetry has the strength and sweetness of vegetation with the power of progressively revealing to us the nature of the earth in which it grows.""His enchantment is that dangerous, double-edged power of a Prospero, a magician who has visioned life in all its complexity..."Joseph BruchacThe collection is illustrated by the poet's brother, Winston Kellman.Anthony Kellman was born in Barbados. He currently teaches at Augusta College, Georgia.

Read more less

In the continuing rite of return to his native Barbados from longer and longer away, something has happened for Tony Kellman. No longer are these the alienated poems of the long gap, of belonging nowhere. With greater establishment in America has come, on the wings of a stranger, the capacity to embrace this past and to see wholly afresh what was once familiar and unremarked. Parallel to these poems of place, are those that explore new love and its power to heal and renew vision.As well as Barbados, there are poems set in worlds as different as sharecropping Georgia and Yorkshire, England. In all of them one hears Kellman's signal voice which combines his urbane capacity to 'hum forever simple pleasure' and the ecstatic vision of a poet who 'puts on the garment of praise' to 'retell our special story'.Part of the freshness of retelling is rooted in Kellman's explorations of the rhythms of Barbadian popular music, particularly the Tuk band, his confident use of the ancestral to make the new.Anthony Kellman was born in Barbados. He currently teaches at Augusta College, Georgia.

Read more less

Anthony Kellman has created a warmly human work of historical fiction. He locates it between the trace of a satirical folk song, ridiculing the old African king’s affair with his Barbadian servant, and the official records of the illegal kidnapping and exile to the Caribbean of Jubo Jubogha, the King of Opobo, who stood in the way of British imperial interests in the palm-oil rich region of the Niger delta. The novel focuses on the last four months of Jaja’s life and the ironies of his position in Barbados where Whites dominated all aspects of life and race prejudice was nakedly expressed, but where many Black Barbadians were piqued to discover the presence of an African king amongst them.At the heart of the novel is an entirely human drama in which, though his relationship with young Becka brings new life to his battered body and spirit, and the Barbadian landscape lifts his despair, the king never loses his sense of the injustice done to him or gives up on his urgent desire to return home. Anthony Kellman writes with subtle psychological insights into a relationship that crosses ages and cultures, and with a poet’s perception of the natural beauties of his own island.

Read more less

South Eastern States is a poetry collection centred around travel – ranging from his native Barbados, across the Southern States of the US (especially his home-state of Georgia), and on to Brazil. To share Anthony Kellman's journeyings is to delight in his eye for 'our small deep gestures', the 'polyphony in the common salt' of human interaction.There are telling observations on both the tenacity of the old and the curiosity of the very young. There are savagely witty tales about the pretension and philistinism still rife on the island of his birth, as well as poems of homage to those authors, like George Lamming, who strive to reverse the trend. Most of all, though, there is an overwhelming urge to sing songs of praise.Anthony Kellman was born in Barbados in 1955. At eighteen he moved to London, drawing up close links with the Poetry Society and the likes of Alan Brownjohn, James Berry and Peter Forbes. He is the author of seven collections, including Limestone (2008) and Wings of a Stranger (2001), and two novels, The Houses of Alphonso (2004) and The Coral Rooms (1994), all published by Peepal Tree Press. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Augusta College, Georgia.

Read more less

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

Read more less

"Limestone" is the epic poem of Barbados (porous limestone island), and a major achievement in the development of an indigenous Caribbean poetics. Drawing on the Barbadian folk music of Tuk, Anthony Kellman invents his own form of Tuk verse to write the story of his island from the destruction of the Amerindians to the present day. In part one, the verse is based on the three-line tercet form of the early Tuk song. This section uses both invented characters and actual historical persons such as Bussa and Nanny Grigg, the leaders of the 1816 slave revolt, to explore the epic of loss, survival and reinvention in the lives of the African slaves. The verse form of part two is based on the vocal melodies of the contemporary Tuk song, rhymed couplets in tetrameters with occasional improvised or 'picong' breaks. This section is set in the post-emancipation period up to 1987 when Barbados had reached twenty-one years of independence. Through the voices of those who lead the struggle against colonialism - Samuel Jackman Prescod, Charles O'Neal, Clement Payne, Grantley Adams and Errol Barrow - Kellman explores in a series of dramatic monologues the inner anguish of these popular leaders over the slow pace of advance and the inevitable compromises with external power. And as the society becomes increasingly polarized in terms of class and wealth, and the queues of would-be emigrants at the American consulate lengthen, the island, always the central character of the epic, asks: when a White business class still dominates the economy, who has benefited from the people's struggles of the past? What has been the fate of the 'children' of Bussa and Nanny Grigg? The verse form in part three is based on the rhythmic patterns of the seminal instrument in Tuk music, the snare drum. This section is set at the end of the twentieth century and tells the stories of Livingston, a young musician, and Levinia, an Indian-African Barbadian schoolteacher who has migrated to Georgia, USA. Their stories explore the complex relationship of contemporary Barbadians to their homeland: deep attachment and an equal frustration over the absence of opportunities. Though Livingston and Levinia meet only in the most fleeting way, their lives intertwine in signifying that the island and its people still nurture within them the dreams of freedom and self-fulfilment. "Limestone" has a truly epic sweep. It narrates countless stories and creates many different voices to construct a vision of Barbados that encompasses suffering and achievement, heroic struggle and the setbacks of born of self-interest and timorous compromise. Like the great epics of Homer and Virgil it connects images of the past to contemporary dilemmas. Above all, "Limestone" is never other than a poem: a vast treasure house of images, sounds and rhythms that move, entertain and absorb the reader in its world.

Read more less