Search results for ""Author Wayne Brown""

Wayne Brown's On the Coast was first published in 1972. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in the UK and established Brown as one of the finest young poets of the post-Walcott generation. It was followed in 1988 by Voyages, a collection that amply showed the maturing of Brown's remarkable gifts but was rarely available. Now, long after some of the 'revolutionary' poets are forgotten, it is possible to see that Brown's work has been seminal in Caribbean poetry, both for its intrinsic qualities, and for Brown's crucial role as the mentor of a current generation of Caribbean poets. This edition restores the original text of the 1972 edition and adds the new poems first published in the later collection.Wayne Brown's poems approach the issues of creativity, finding meaning, finding contentment and the threats to these human goals through poems about Caribbean nature (his bestiary of sea creatures makes him a Caribbean Ted Hughes); through anecdote, frequently drawing on family life; through poems about favourite artists such as Neruda, Nabakov, Rilke and the Tobagan poet Eric Roach; through reflecting on the rewards and pain of remaining in the Caribbean compared to the loss suffered by those writers and artists who left the islands.Best known as one of the Caribbean's most incisive commentators, Wayne Brown raised a weekly newspaper column to a literary art. Between 1984 and 2009, some 3,500 editions of his column In Our Time appeared in Trinidadian and Jamaican newspapers

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If one wanted to find out what Trinidad and the Caribbean have been like in the last decades of the 20th century, there would be no better place to look than the stories in this collection. Whilst many of the writers of his generation reconstructed the Caribbean world from distance and memory, publishing primarily for a metropolitan audience, Brown's stories began as publications in his weekly newspaper column with a very substantial popular audience. But there is nothing ephemeral about this work, because Brown invested these pieces with all a major poet's delight in the power of language and with a craftsman's meticulous concern for their structure as short stories. Frequently, the line between fiction and actuality is deliberately blurred as Brown invokes the shaping light of memory to resurrect the people and places he had known or loved (or merely imagined). Wayne Brown is no less a character in these fictions than Philip Roth and his various avatars are in his novels. What the reader encounters in the collection is Brown's striking ability to portray people and tell stories that are particular and unique, but which cohere to form an unrivalled portrait of a rapidly changing society.Best known as one of the Caribbean's most incisive commentators, Wayne Brown raised a weekly newspaper column to a literary art. Between 1984 and 2009, some 3,500 editions of his column "In Our Time" appeared in Trinidadian and Jamaican newspapers.

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