Search results for ""Author Raymond Ramcharitar""

Raymond Ramcharitar's sophisticated and formally ambitious poems have Trinidad as their centre but are global in scope. This is reflected both in their subject matter and their form. The regular movement between the Caribbean, Europe and North America that several of the poems chart is seen both as a contemporary reality, and as no more than a continuation of history's patterns: of, for instance, Indo-Trinidadians who are the 'scions of waylaid Brahmins and pariahs'. This particular migration is placed in the context of a wider world of human movement and 'new theologies springing from old longings'. In form, too, the poems refuse to be confined by any limiting sense of the contemporary and the Caribbean. Use of the archetypes of classical mythology, traditional verse patterns (such as the villanelle) and the careful, confident use of rhythm and rhyme are the most evident outward features of Ramcharitar's concern with form. There are homages to Derek Walcott and Wallace Stevens, but the closer one's acquaintance with the poems, the more evident that Ramcharitar's post-modern voice is a thoroughly individual one, with a capacity for writing verse narratives that are condensed but reverberate like the best short stories, dramatic monologues that skilfully create other voices, and lyric poems that get inside the less obvious byways of emotion.Raymond Ramcharitar was born in Trinidad. He worked as a journalist and is the author of a controversial and provocative study of the deficiencies of the Trinidadian press, Breaking the News: Media & Culture in Trinidad.

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A complex, rich and rewarding new poetry collection from Raymond Ramcharitar.50 is an age to see where you stand with the world and where the world stands with you. Though the collection does not begin “Midway through this life...”, the first two poems are about a Modern Angel and a Modern Virgil. Ramcharitar offers ferociously satiric views of the Modern Caribbean, Modern Journalism and a world inhabited by Trump and Jong Un; in a world that’s out of joint, it’s not surprising to find the Modern Mind trying to mend itself after it’s been shattered. Behind the mordant, funny, and often sad voices speaking in the poems, there’s a romantic spirit at work, a touching faith in the powers of poetry. There’s an investment in formal poetic structures and rigorous rhyming which is not just an acknowledgement of one patron saint, Derek Walcott, but a means to discipline strong feelings.Other patron saints, angels and demons roam the collection’s pages – like the angel formerly known as Sinead O’Connor, the fragile, rebellious figure who calls forth a poem of solidarity and tenderness. From the Mahabarata and The Tempest, Kafka and Joyce to synth-pop heroes like OMD, and elegies for VS Naipaul and Derek Walcott, 50 is the time to confess some strange and unexpected cultural tastes, and acknowledge your realisation of a Prufrockian insignificance in the grand scheme of things. And 50 is also the painful time of saying farewell to parents and questioning what you have given your children, about both of which Ramcharitar writes with touching grace.

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Raymond Ramcharitar is a writer, a journalist, and a cultural critic from Trinidad. He is the author of a controversial study of the Trinidadian media, "Breaking the News: Media and Culture in Trinidad," the short story collection "The Island Quintet," and the poetry collection "American Fall."

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Raymond Ramcharitar's vision is rooted in Trinidad, but as a globalised island with permeable borders, frequent birds of passage, and outposts in New York and London. One of the collection's outstanding qualities is that it is both utterly contemporary and written with a profound and disturbed sense of the history that shapes the island. As befits fiction from the home of carnival and mas', it is a collection much concerned with the flesh - often in transgressive forms as if characters are driven to test their boundaries - and with the capacity of its characters to reinvent themselves in manifold, and sometimes outrageous disguises. One of the masks is race, and the stories are acerbically honest about the way tribal loyalties distort human relations. Its tone ranges from the lyric - Trinidad as an island of arresting beauty - to a seaminess of the most grungy kind. It has an ambition that challenges a novel such as V.S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men, but is written with the anger and the compassion of a writer for whom the island still means everything. In the novella, 'Froude's Arrow', Ramcharitar has written a profound fiction that tells us where the Caribbean currently is in juxtaposing the deep, still to be answered questions about island existence (the fragmentations wrought by history, the challenges of smallness in the global market, race and class divides) and the scrabbling for survival, fame and fortune that arouse the ire of Ramcharitar's acerbic and satirical vision.Raymond Ramcharitar was born in Trinidad. He worked as a journalist and is the author of a controversial and provocative study of the deficiencies of the Trinidadian press, Breaking the News: Media & Culture in Trinidad.

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