Search results for ""Author Kendel Hippolyte""

Kendel Hippolyte’s poetry moves easily, boldly between the worlds of public engagement and the intimacies of domesticity. What unites this movement are the distinctive sounds and rhythms of his voice, and whilst some poems have a named recipient, and some are addressed to himself, all engage the reader in an implicit dialogue. His is an art of sound, of the rhythms of the long, supple line, of form that sometimes disguises itself as no form, of the beauty of the crooked basket. He wants the poem to draw us in rather than hold us outside in admiration at its skill – and skill and craft are what his poems display in spades. His is a vision that extends outwards in illimitable ways in space and time, but where the scale is always the human body, the human mind.The challenge comes in the way his poems address the dread reality of a Caribbean world of disappointed dreams, of sovereignty swamped by the new economic and cultural imperialism that masquerades under the mask of globalisation, of waking “one morning and the Caribbean was gone”, of continuing environmental degradation. The questioning comes from looking inwards to wonder why this has happened, what failures of vision, what empty sloganizing, what dishonesties, arrogance and failures of mutual respect led to the defeats so that “the rivers of Babylon clog into vomit…” The comfort comes from both the small loving kindnesses of the domestic – the rituals of coffee-brewing, of bed-making – but also the refusal to retreat, to look to the moment when flint and iron can “flare into the hot bright moment of a spark”.

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Kendel Hippolyte is a poet, a playwright, and a director. He is the author of five books of poetry, including "Birthright" and "Fault Lines," and his writing has been featured in various journals, such as the "Greenfield Review" and the "Massachusetts Review," as well as in the anthologies "Caribbean Poetry Now" and "Voiceprint." He has twice won the Minvielle & Chastanet Fine Arts Award for Literature and was awarded the St. Lucia Medal of Merit in 2000.""

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

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With the verbal urgency of Ginsberg's Howl, and a visionary imagination in the company of Blake, Fault Lines confirms Kendel Hippolyte's reputation as one of the Caribbean's most important poets.These poems are dreaded, urgent prophecies of 'a black sky beyond' – indispensable guides to life on a small island constantly threatened by the thrashings of capitalism in crisis. Here St. Lucia's Paradise is a cruise ship come to remind you of your neo-colonial status, where global consumerism has poisoned the ambition of youth towards drugs, crime and violence.And a true poem is a glimpsed oblique track opened by the strenuous silver writhingof a poetriddling a living way through dying language, creating a whole, hoping we fall, mindful,into it (from 'Silverfish')Kendel Hippolyte was born in St. Lucia in 1952, and is a poet, playwright and director. He has published five books of poetry, including Birthright (Peepal Tree, 1997) and Night Visions (2006). He has performed his work in the Caribbean, Europe and America. In 2007, he won the Bridget Jones Travel Award to travel to the UK to present his one-man dramatised poetry production, Kinky Blues, at the annual conference of the Society for Caribbean Studies. In 2000 he was awarded the St. Lucia Medal of Merit (Gold) for his contribution to the arts.

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