Search results for ""peepal tree press ltd""
Peepal Tree Press Ltd The Animated Universe
The Animated Universe is the long-awaited debut of a seasoned poet who has traveled the world honing her craft and, in the process, settling into the assurance and confidence in her voice. These poems reflect her movement, but above all they speak to her core belief in the power of empathy and compassion as aesthetic markers. In “signs” she writes, “Everywhere I go/ I see the people I love in the faces of strangers,..” Her poems range across three modes of seeing: the ode that reveals her penchant for finding beauty in the unusual, in the ordinary and in the disquieting things of the world; her legends, which are the mythologizing of daily life that only great calypsonians and natural storytellers are able to achieve; and finally, her lyric disrobing of her heart, her soul and her body—a sacrifice she makes with heart because of her strong conviction that the sharing of self is a healing quality of poetry: “I am a figment/ of God’s imagination. / I am more than/ I say. I am./ I am who I am/ becoming.” If there are echoes of Ntosake Shange here, it is because, like Shange, Thornhill understands the deeply spiritual function of the poet, and she embraces the role of the poet as a a priestess in service of the community. And yet, in all of this, we find in Thornhill the splendid tensions and graces of an immigrant’s imagination and language, rooted as she is in her Trinidad birthplace, and her uneasy American home. There is a throw-back quality to her rhymes, invoking in the long-breathed journey to the satisfaction of rhyme, the “def” stage, the spoken-world space during its emergent height. But this is the beginning of the formal exploration. Thornhill, the poet, was made by the energy and immediacy of the stage, a poetry willing to improvise through elliptical leaps while being grounded in sound, rich sound, and the satisfaction of the rhyme’s reliability, and above all, while grounded in the story, the tall tale, the myth-making.
£9.99
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Prophets
Set in Jamaica in the late 1980s and 1990s, Prophets is a poem of rhythmic and metaphoric inventiveness that portrays the social and cultural resonances of Jamaican society along with the tension between an ebullient cynicism and a heartfelt desire for faith. As 24-hour television, belching out the voices of American hellfire preachers, competes with dancehall, slackness, and ganja for Jamaican minds, Clarice and Thalbot preach their own conflicting visions. Clarice has used her gifts to raise herself from the urban Jamaican ghetto. She basks in the adulation of her followers as they look to her for their personal salvation. Thalbot has fallen from comfort and security onto the streets. With his wild matted hair and nakedness, he is a deranged voice in the wilderness. Whilst Clarice has her blue-eyed Jesus, Thalbot brandishes his blackness in the face of every passer-by. But when, under cover of darkness, Clarice "sins" on the beach, Thalbot alone knows of her fall. He sets out to journey, like Jonah, to denounce the prophetess and warn the Ninevite city of its coming doom. An epic struggle begins.
£9.99
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Kitch: A fictional biography of a calypso icon
The poet and musician Anthony Joseph met and spoke to Lord Kitchener just once, in 1984, when he found the calypso icon standing alone for a moment in the heat of Port of Spain’s Queen’s Park Savannah, one Carnival Monday afternoon. It was a pivotal meeting in which the great calypsonian, outlined his musical vision, an event which forms a moving epilogue to Kitch, Joseph’s unique biography of the Grandmaster.Lord Kitchener (1922 - 2000) was one of the most iconic and prolific calypso artists of the 20th century. He was one of calypso’s most loved exponents, an always elegantly dressed troubadour with old time male charisma and the ability to tap into the musical and cultural consciousness of the Caribbean experience. Born into colonial Trinidad in 1922, he emerged in the 1950s, at the forefront of multicultural Britain, acting as an intermediary between the growing Caribbean community, the islands they had left behind, and the often hostile conditions of life in post War Britain. In the process Kitch, as he was affectionally called, single handedly popularised the calypso in Britain.Kitch represents the first biographical study of Aldwyn Roberts, according to calypso lore, christened Lord Kitchener, because of his stature and enthusiasm for the art form. Utilising an innovative, polyvocal style which combines life-writing with poetic prose, the narrative alternates between first person anecdotes by Kitchener’s fellow calypsonians, musicians, lovers and rivals, and lyrically rich fictionalised passages. By focussing equally on Kitchener’s music as on his hitherto undocumented private and political life, Joseph gets to the heart of the man behind the music and the myth, reaching behind the sobriquet, to present a holistic portrait of the calypso icon.
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Peepal Tree Press Ltd Doe Songs
Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné’s poems inhabit a world of permeable barriers and transformations between men and women, humans and animals, the hunters and the hunted and the living and the dead. Her collection creates for us vivid images of the rural Trinidadian world, where she grew up and still lives in. This is a world where the real and the mythical rub shoulders, where people know about the magical properties of plants, where anything can happen, where “everything that breathes will howl”. What emerges from her vivid word pictures are images of the complexity of family ties, of motherhood that is both tender and fearsome, of an intimacy with the natural world which is torn between fears for its fragility and hopes for its resilience. In the words of Shivanee Ramlochan, “Boodoo-Fortuné’s lines are primed for simplicity and brutality alike… of the promises stirring within buried bones… and all manner of unknowable, mysterious selves.”As the recent winner of the Holick-Arvon and Wasafiri poetry prizes, Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné is a powerful new voice in poetry.
£8.99
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Fault Lines
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.
£9.99
Peepal Tree Press Ltd A Leaf in His Ear: Selected Poems
When Mahadai Das died at the tragically early age of 49, there was an outpouring of grief across the Caribbean that a poet, who never quite had the chance to build a literary career to match her talents, had been lost. She had been known for some time as a highly promising Guyanese poet, but when Peepal Tree published her Bones in 1988, there was widespread critical recognition that here was an outstandingly original new voice. Then severe illness struck and though there followed occasional poems that developed the achievement of Bones, there was no new collection.This Collected Poems, discussed with Mahadai Das before her death, and organised in co-operation with the poet's sister, brings together almost all the poems she wrote. It includes I Want to Be a Poetess of My People (1976), My Finer Steel Will Grow (1982), and Bones (1988). In addition, A Leaf in His Ear brings together many of the fine poems published in journals and previously uncollected, and some unpublished work, from lively, humorous nation-language poems to experiments with ballad forms and the oblique, gnomic poems written in the years after Bones.With an introduction by Denise DeCaires Narain Gurnah.Mahadai Das was born in Guyana in 1954. She was a dancer, actress, teacher, beauty-queen and volunteer member of the Guyana National Service. She left Guyana to philosophy in the USA. Then came debilitating health problems. She died in 2003.
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Peepal Tree Press Ltd Chinese Lanterns from the Blue Child
Anthony McNeill was without doubt amongst the finest contemporary Caribbean poets, whose previous collections were hailed as works of immense originality. Chinese Lanterns from the Blue Child won the 1995 Jamaican National Literary Award. Completed shortly before his death, it is a farewell to the world which moves like a bird in flight between moments of painful regret, wry humour and a sense of closure. Anthony McNeill's word-lanterns will continue to flame in the darkness long beyond his death.Anthony McNeill was born in Jamaica in 1941 and died in 1996. His previous collections include Reel from 'The Life Movie' (1972) and Credences at the Altar of Cloud (1979).
£8.23
Peepal Tree Press Ltd In The Name Of Our Families
The fourth and final instalment in the poetic conversation, begun in 2014, between poets and friends Kwame Dawes and John Kinsella.
£12.99
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Difficult Fruit
Difficult Fruit grapples with personal experience - with naming and claiming the 'fruits' of a specific journey into womanhood. This journey is one which includes coming to terms with violence and loss, celebrating love and connection, and standing witness in the world that shaped that journey. It is a collection of poems about coming into self-knowledge - of fighting for and winning personhood as a woman in the world. The central poem, 'Eighteen', chronicles the aftermath of sexual assault. In it the speaker is reborn from the shadow of the experience as a 'miracle scream' and a 'dark voice', and vows to 'learn the language that will allow [her] to summon [her] own angels'. By the poem 'Thirty', the speaker understands 'maybe older and wiser is just learning/ how to put yourself in your own good hands'. The poems of age scattered throughout the manuscript both chronicle and disrupt time - they look back into the speaker's past as a way to understand the present, as well as to find something that the speaker needs in order to move forward. The many elegies in the collection consider the ultimate price of life, which is death, and as the poem 'How It Touches Us' comes to realise, 'all laws of matter must hold true'. The poems are a movement through fracture - both necessary and unwarranted - toward wholeness and transformation.
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Peepal Tree Press Ltd Night Vision
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.""
£8.99
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Riot
Gerald Manston and his friends Shifty and Fu lead pretty uneventful lives until the arrival of the "upheaval." When the opportunity arrives for a better way of life, the poor folks of Kingston, Jamaica--including Gerald--cannot resist the lure of excitement, danger, and change. This touching story not only discusses political issues, but also promotes family values.
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Peepal Tree Press Ltd Escape to An Autumn Pavement
Johnnie Sobert is a brown Jamaican who earns his living as a barman in a Soho club. Sobert is a man divided: between Black and White; between class identities; between heterosexual and homosexual desires; between being an exiled Jamaican and an incipient Black Londoner. Against the background of bedsitter Hampstead and bohemian Soho, Sobert attempts to be, as he describes himself, a 'nigger with coolth' but the reality is that his wisecracking persona is an all too transparent cover for his uncertainties. He embarks on an unsatisfactory affair with his landlady, Fiona, which makes him uncomfortably aware of the stereotype of black desire for 'white pussy', and then goes to live with his gay friend Dick. The novel ends with Johnnie yet to make a decision about where his desires really lie.Introduction by Thomas Glave.
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Peepal Tree Press Ltd A Day in the Country
In these stories of Indian life in Trinidad in the 1940s and 50s, Ismith Khan brings to vivid life the morning smells of eggplant frying in coconut oil, and herrings baking in the embers of the earthen fireplace; childhoods such as Pooran's, who has to make his way between the poetic mythology of the pundit and the cold, rationalistic materialism of his science teacher, or 'Thiney Boney' who, newly arrived in Port of Spain from the country, has to choose between his new Creole friends and his father's harsh moral certainties. These are not comfortable childhoods, and several stories show the pressures of poverty and despair leading to the abuse of children by their parents. Stories deal with the trauma of urbanisation as Indians are drawn from the country to Port of Spain, though even in the villages, where the shining metal of the oil refineries dwarfs the grasscutter tending his oxen, old ways must change. Ismith Khan brings a tender and affecting style to stories of troubled childhoods, questioning youth and adult struggle. This is beautiful writing to savour beyond place and time."The brilliant short story 'A Day in the Country' has a home in my heart. It reminded me of the intense, uplifting genius of Thomas Wolfe's (1900-1938) short story 'Circus at Dawn'. In both stories the concentration on life, on living, on things seen, heard and felt, is so full and rich that plot becomes unnecessary. But 'A Day in the Country' is much more than a generous slice of life, and it does much more than revel in secure country childhood, or celebrate boyhood in the countryside. It makes a moving, ominous communication about the unsheltering of Trinidad, about its unprepared journey, from the 'Drinking Rum and Coca Cola' years of the 40s and 50s to the bewildering, homogeneous brutality of the 20th century."Keith Jardim, The Trinidad GuardianIsmith Khan was born in Trinidad in 1925. He is the author of The Jumbie Bird and The Obeah Man. He lived in New York until his death in 2002.
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Peepal Tree Press Ltd The Shape Of That Hurt
Continuing on from his outstanding collection of literary criticism, My Strangled City and other essays, literary critic and Professor Gordon Rohlehr delves further, examining the work of Sam Selvon, Louise Bennett, Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott and many other luminaries of the Caribbean. Originally published by Longman in 1992, this is a marvellous addition to the Caribbean Modern Classics series.
£17.99
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Portable Paradise
Roger Robinson’s range is wide: the joys and pains of family life; observations on the threatening edge of violence below the surface energies of Black British territories in London; memories of an older Trinidad and visits that tell him both how he and the country have changed; emblematic poems on the beauty and often bizarre strangeness of the world of animals; quizzical responses to the strange, the heartening, and the appalling in incidents encountered in daily life; reflections on the purposes and costs of making art, as in fine poems on a George Stubbs’ painting, cocaine and Coltrane’s Ascension, and questioning thoughts on the ideologies of Toni Morrison and John Milton. The poems express a fierce anger against injustice, but also convey the irrepressible sense that Roger Robinson cannot help but love people for their humour, oddity and generosity of spirit.'With A Portable Paradise, Roger Robinson shows us that he can be the voice of our communal consciousness, while at the same time always subverting, playing and beguiling with his beautiful verse' Afua Hirsch
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Peepal Tree Press Ltd Countersong to Walt Whitman
First published by Azul Editions in 1993, Countersong to Walt Whitman and Other Poems is the only book-length collection of Mir's poetry in English translation. The eight poems selected include several of his signature pieces from the late 1940s through the 1970s: “Countersong to Walt Whitman”; “There Is a Country in the World”; “If Somebody Wants to Know Which Is My Country”; “To the Battleship Intrepid”; “Not One Step Back”; “Amen to Butterflies”; “Concerto of Hope for the Left Hand”; “Meditation on the Shores of Evening.” The introduction by Silvio Torres-Saillant, author of Caribbean Poetics (Peepal Tree Press), and foreword by Jean Franco, author of Cruel Modernity (Duke University Press), enable a broader appreciation for the personal context and general impact of Mir's work. A selected bibliography of works by and about the poet, including an accounting of the prose he has published as a novelist, author of short stories, essayist, and historian, provides readers with ample resources for further appreciation of Mir's achievement. In his introduction, Torres-Saillant emphasizes: “The present bilingual edition... will give both Spanish- and English-speaking readers... the opportunity to recognize themselves in the poetic visage of one of the most authentic literary artists to have come from the Caribbean.” About the first publication, Roberto Márquez stated in the Village Voice: “The publication, in bilingual format, of this first book-length anthology of work by the Dominican Republic's internationally acclaimed and locally celebrated National Poet is an event—long anticipated, too long delayed... Colleague, contemporary, and the equal in lyric vitality, epic ambition, and communal significance to Pablo Neruda or Nicolás Guillén, Mir remains, with Martinique's Aimé Césaire, perhaps the most masterfully elegant and majestic among the living voices of a generation that boasts more than its share of world-class poets... [Mir's] poetry achieves a rare, exceptionally felicitous marriage of poetry and politics, of individual sensibility and the chronicling of quotidian collective drama, the still unfulfilled promise of Latin America, its landscape, peoples, and societies.”
£12.99
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Drought
The endless rows of cane were withered and burnt yellowish-brown by the sun. Nearly everywhere the boys looked they saw that the furrows, which were ordinarily straight and neat, were now uneven and jagged with huge lumps of earth, fallen trash and dead weeds. It had taken weeks of dry, sizzling weather to scorch the lushness out of the plantation, to dehydrate the juice out of the cane, and to disfigure the even pattern of the furrows.It is dry season. The small village of Nain is suffering. Its people, livestock and crops have all been affected and things are looking bleak.But Seth Stone and friends Man Boy, Benjie, Double Ugly and Mango Head are determined to take matters into their own hands—with unexpected results.Praise for the original 1960s edition:"Even those who have never experienced a drought will know what it is like after reading this book. By the time the rains finally come the reader has got the idea not only of the heat and hardship, but of the people and the way of life in a Jamaican village. The four boys and their game of 'Rain' are very real, and the almost miraculous outcome of their game is completely believable. Not a book for every child, but one that will make a lasting impression on those who read it."—Children's Book News
£7.62
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Caribbean Erotic
Caribbean Erotic is a revealing, wide-ranging and in-depth exploration of the many facets of the erotic in contemporary Caribbean literature. It includes poetry, short fiction and critical essays; work that celebrates desire, work that depicts realistically the psychology of, for instance, a woman whose desperate wish is that her abusive husband still desires her, and work that explores the role of fantasy in the erotic. Infidelity, self-respect, rape, self-love, lust and child-birth are other themes which are interpreted in the collection with honesty and insight. As an anthology, Caribbean Erotic is intended both to arouse pleasure and generate thought about what is, despite the touristic stereotypes, still a conflicted area of Caribbean literature and culture."The beauty of Caribbean Erotic is that it lifts the veils that curtain the many rooms of Caribbean sexuality; its genius is its skilful guidance through the lusty, bawdy, worshipful and spiritual wealth, as we lose our senses to find our selves." Earl Lovelace
£14.99
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Birthright
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.
£8.99
Peepal Tree Press Ltd A Lexicon of South African Indian English
A scholarly and entertaining study of words, phrases and idioms which reflects the diverse social and linguistic currents within which the Indian South African community has developed. It focuses on the effects of language contact in borrowings, grammatical interference and semantic shifts as speakers of Indic languages came into contact with speakers of English, Afrikaans, Fanagalo and African languages. It focuses on the Indic lexical items which are common to all speakers, irrespective of whether their ancestral language was Tamil or Bhojpuri; on the lexical items restricted to particular subgroups depending on their ancestral language. It further annotates the idiomatic and slang phrases found principally amongst speakers of SAIE and identifies the specific grammatical and phonological features which characterise this variety of English. Mesthrie's work shows clearly both the distinctiveness of SAIE and its South Africanness. This lexicon provides an invaluable source of comparison with Indian English, the Creoles of the Caribbean, and with the linguistic experience of other overseas South Asian communities."Mesthrie's A Lexicon of South African Indian English, described by the author as a supplement (and also complement) to the 1980 edition of A Dictionary of South African English (ed. Jean Branford) is a valuable and interesting endeavour in its own right. It is a valid contribution to the study of language and should appeal to students of linguistics, sociologists, anthropologists and cultural historians. The Lexicon also adds to the growing body of works on the contributions of the Indian South Africans."Rambhajun Sitaram, LexicosRajend Mesthrie was born in Durban, South Africa. He wrote his doctorate on the transformation of Bhojpuri in South Africa. He currently teaches linguistics at the University of Cape Town.
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Peepal Tree Press Ltd Imaginary Origins: Selected Poems
A few years ago, Kamau Brathwaite described Cyril Dabydeen as 'one of the most confident and accomplished voices in the Caribbean diaspora this side of the late 20th century. Now in the 21st century there is the opportunity to savour the growth and achievement of over thirty years. From his first Canadian publications, Goatsong, Distances, This Planet Earth, Heart's Frame and Elephants Make Good Stepladders from the 1970s and early 80s, to his Canadian publications of the 1990s, Stoning the Wind and Born in Amazonia, not forgetting his two Peepal Tree publications, Islands Lovelier than a Vision and Discussing Columbus, Cyril Dabydeen has selected those poems that best represent the journey he has made across multiple boundaries. From his roots as an Asian whose grandparents migrated as indentured labourers from 19th century India, from his shaping as a Guyanese growing up during a period of intense national ferment, and his life as an adult in Canada, Cyril Dabydeen has shaped a vision that makes an enlightening virtue of heterogeneity. Not merely a Guyanese exile, but a writer who has immersed himself in the landscapes, history and lived experience of Canada (and without losing the insistent promptings of Guyanese memory and concern), Dabydeen's poetry shows the rich possibilities inherent in combining immigrant and diasporic selves. His work ranges across the confessional, the narrative and the mythic but always with an unwavering integrity in seeking the interior truth of the poem. He writes with a conversational directness, a clarity born of careful craft, but with an obliqueness of angle and density of image that constantly shifts the reader into new and rewarding frames of reference.Cyril Dabydeen was born in Guyana in 1945. He migrated to Canada in 1970. He is the author of almost a dozen collections of poetry, two novels and six collections of short stories.
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Peepal Tree Press Ltd Musings, Mazes, Muses, Margins
There is nothing quite like Gordon Rohlehr’s Musings, Mazes, Muses, Margins in Caribbean writing; probably its nearest neighbours are Kamau Brathwaite’s The Zea Mexican Diary and Trenchtown Rock. Over a period of more than forty years, Rohlehr, supreme public critic of the post-colonial Caribbean, its creative writing and the historian and deep analyser of calypso, has been paying quiet attention to his inner consciousness, a fictive journeying that has much to say about outer personal and wider Caribbean realities. It is a book that ranges over a variety of forms – diary, recorded dreams, poems, a kind of flash fiction, polemics, prophecies, and philosophical reflections -- all enriched by a lifetime of reading, thinking and articulate writing. As befits the slippery connections between inner and outer worlds, Rohlehr’s writing is distinguished by an infectious humour and a delight in puns.In the act of questioning what the years of “wuk” have achieved, Rohlehr asks himself and us the most profound questions – not the unanswerable metaphysics of “What are we here for?” but the material, ethical question of “To what end do we exist?” In the context of a Caribbean of disappointed post-colonial hopes, Rohlehr both confronts an existential void and records the increments of creativity and achievement that offer future hope.The book begins with the Guyanese child, born with a caul over his face, gifted with a prophetic vision deeply immersed in the African being that is part of his inheritance. He records how he was told – beyond his memory – how family members “steamed” his eyes to destroy something embarrassing to a colonial, lower-middle class family. The visions and intuitive knowledge disappeared, but if the family elders believed that they were cauterising something to destruction, they failed utterly to kill the visionary dreamer, the Daniel Lyonnes-Denne, who is one part of the triumvirate that also includes the public Gordon and the reticent Frederick.In his previous books, Gordon Rohlehr confronted the Caribbean world head-on. Here, he approaches from the margins, and who is to say his dream-work doesn’t tell just as powerful truths about Caribbean reality?
£13.99
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Come Let Us Sing Anyway
A brave, exciting and adult collection that entertains with wit, shocks with frankness, and engages both intellect and emotion. Richly varied, it ranges from extended stories to intense pieces of flash fiction.Stories may be set in realistic settings – but develop magical narrative twists that make us see all afresh. Others begin in fantasy – returnees from the dead, a man who finds discarded hymens – but are so skilfully realist we can only believe in their actuality.
£9.99
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Ascent to Omai
In Ascent to Omai time and space are truly elastic, so that events in recent time become part of remote geological time and the boundaries between events and remembering, individual persons and different locations are fluid and permeable. Victor is in search of his father, Adam, once a revolutionary worker who was sent to prison many years ago for burning down the factory he works in. Since then Victor has lost touch with him, but suspects he is living as a pork-knocker (gold prospector) in the remote Cuyuni-Mazaruni district of Guyana – now the site of one of the largest open-cast goldmines in the world and the site of immense environmental degradation. Prophetically, the clash between the material/technological and the primordial/spiritual is one of the intercutting themes of the novel, connecting to the El Doradean myth so central to the Guyanese imagining.As he climbs in search of his father, Victor both revisits his past relationship with him and replays his father’s trial, which also becomes his own, in a way that echoes the "Nighttown" episode of Ulysses, though unlike Bloom’s. Victor’s offences are not sexual, but represent blockages in the openness of his thinking. Victor’s search is for spiritual grace, for the compensations of love and the glimmerings of a true understanding of the world he exists in, though Harris refuses to “impose a false coherency upon material one had to digest” and the reader is invited to share in Victor’s struggling ascent to consciousness, knowing that it can never be other than provisional.
£8.99
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Tell No-One About This: Collected Short Stories 1975-2017
This substantial collection brings together short stories written over a span of forty years, including those first published in the highly-rated Song for Simone (1986) and A Way to Catch the Dust (1999) and more than a dozen new stories. The previously published pieces have been extensively revised. They range from stories set in Grenada at different periods from the 1970s onwards, to several set in the UK.These are stories that have a narrative drive, a meticulousness of construction, an exactness of image and a rigorous economy in the prose. They are inventive in their explorations of a variety of narrative voices – from children to adults, male and female, Caribbean and British – that establish a persona and capture the reader from the first sentence.
£14.99
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Visions and Voices: Conversations With Fourteen Caribbean Playwrights
The late 1970s and early 1980s saw a major cultural revolution in Caribbean theatre. This new critical study comprises interviews with the key players in this first generation of postcolonial playwrights, few of whom are still alive today. The book touches on their experiences as struggling artists in the Caribbean, along with the changing perceptions of their work, and of the region as a whole.The authors profiled in Visions and Voices are Derek Walcott, Errol Hill, Errol John, Michael Abbensetts, Trevor Rhone, Alwyn Bully, Roderick Walcott, Edgar White, Slade Hopkinson, Lennox Brown, Carmen Tipling, Dennis Scott, Stafford Ashani Harrison and Mustapha Matura. Introduced by Kwame Dawes.Olivier Stephenson is a poet, playwright, screenwriter and journalist. He is a founding member of the Caribbean American Repertory Theatre in New York City and Los Angeles. He lives in Miami.
£17.99
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Johnson's Dictionary
Winner of the 2014 Guyana Prize for Fiction, Johnson's Dictionary is set variously in 18th century London and Demerara in British Guiana. It is a celebration of the skills of the enslaved as organisers, story-tellers, artists and mathematicians, hidden in the main from their white masters and mistresses, that is resonant with an undying human urge for freedom.Galley, gallery, gallimaufry: In a novel set in 18th century London and Demerara (in British Guiana), that might be dreamed or remembered by Manu, a revenant from Dabydeen’s epic poem, “Turner”, we meet slaves, lowly women on the make, lustful overseers, sodomites and pious Jews – characters who have somehow come alive from engravings by Hogarth and others.Hogarth himself turns up as a drunkard official artist in Demerara, from whom the slave Cato steals his skills and discovers a way of remaking his world.The transforming power of words is what enlightens Francis when his kindly (or possibly pederastic) master gifts him a copy of Johnson’s Dictionary, whilst the idiot savant, known as Mmadboy, reveals the uncanny mathematical skills that enable him to beat Adam Smith to the discovery of the laws of capital accumulation – and teach his fellow slaves their true financial worth. From the dens of sexual specialities where the ex-slave Francis conducts a highly popular flagellant mission to cure his clients of their man-love (and preach abolition), to the sugar estates of Demerara, Dabydeen’s novel revels in the connections of Empire, Art, Literature and human desire in ways that are comic, salutary and redemptive.David Dabydeen was born in Guyana in 1957. He is only the second West Indian writer, following VS Naipaul, to be named a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Turner: New and Selected Poems (Cape, 1994) was republished by Peepal Tree in 2002. His 1999 novel A Harlot's Progress was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His other novels include Disappearance (Peepal Tree, 2005) and Molly and the Muslim Stick (2008). He co-edited the Oxford Companion to Black British History (2007), and his documentaries on Guyana have appeared on BBC TV and radio. David is now Professor at the Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick.
£20.78
Peepal Tree Press Ltd The Burning Bush Women & Other Stories
Delores is losing parts of herself, her typing speed, her ability to say 'hi' to work colleagues, until she is no longer Delores at all, but bare-footed Queen Mapusa, child of Africa, proud mother of modern civilization. Etheline Elvira Ransom is lying in bed, with a pair of scissors under her behind, waiting to teach her bullying, errant man a lesson. Odetta is a 54-year-old wife and mother talking her way through the day of her secret abortion. The Burning Bush women are smoking cigars and weaving each other's wild blood-red hair into tight plaits, but the plaits won't hold: somewhere, the hair says, a Bush woman is dying.In these sometimes strange, funny, tragic and truthful stories, Cherie Jones weaves paths through the joys and suffering of women's lives. The writing occupies an in-between space between the magical and the realistic, exploring the tensions between the African folk wisdom Nanan passes on from the ancestors to her grand-daughter, and the colonised dictums that the mother in 'The Bride' offers her daughter about how a respectable woman lives. ('Remember how nappy you can look if you let yourself go.')The Burning Bush Women tells so many stories, so much life, in a rich variety of voices that stay with you long after closing the book. The talented short story writer can tell a lifetime in a few pages, and in this Cherie Jones ranks with the best.Cherie Jones lives and works in Barbados. She was the winner of the first prize in the 1999 Commonwealth Short Story Competition and a prize of £2,000.
£8.23
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England's Colonial Connections
Selected by Bernardine Evaristo as an Observer Best Books 2021Green Unpleasant Land explores the repressed history of rural England’s links to transatlantic enslavement and the East India Company.Combining essays, poems and stories, it details the colonial links of country houses, moorlands, woodlands, village pubs and graveyards. It also explores the links between rural poverty, particularly enclosure, and colonial figures, such as plantation-owners and East India Company nabobs. Fowler, who herself comes from a family of slave-owners, argues that Britain’s cultural and economic legacy is not simply expressed by chinoiserie, statues, monuments, galleries, warehouses and stately homes. This is a shared history: Britons’ ancestors either profited from empire or were impoverished by it. Green Unpleasant Land argues that, in response to recent advances in British imperial history, contemporary authors have reshaped the pastoral writing to break the powerful association between the countryside and Englishness.
£17.99
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Azucar: a novel
Azúcar is a novel about belonging in a world where all things are on the move: people, ideas, foods and not least music. Oswald Kole Osabutey Jnr, henceforth Yunior, leaves his family in Accra to travel to the mythical Caribbean island of Fumaz where the revolutionary philosophy of peopleism just about keeps its flame alive against the forces of an old-style command centre political bureaucracy and a stifling trade blockade from the big imperialist neighbour to the North. Yunior brings the knowledge of the scientist, the skills of a farmer and the heart and invention of a musician to his life in Fumaz. As scientist, he must find some way of rescuing the island’s famed sweet rice industry from collapse; as a farmer, he sees how much of his West African food has journeyed across the Atlantic to make the island’s unique cuisine; as musician he becomes part of the spirit that puts the island on the world stage, out of all proportion to its size. This is a novel of ideas – how much is accidental in the world? How much can be planned? It has much to say about the impact of colonialism on the fragile ecology of the island – but it is the pursuit of love and the tragedy of death, the interweaving of moments of harmony and moments of conflict and the motives of vividly drawn characters that are the drivers of this sometimes zany narrative. And there is always the texture of the language to enjoy in a book whose prose is as flowing, elegant and heartfelt as the music that moves freely back and forth across the seas between Africa and the Caribbean.
£10.99
Peepal Tree Press Ltd The Mermaid of Black Conch
£8.99
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Word Planting
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”.
£9.99
Peepal Tree Press Ltd New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean
Discover some of the best in speculative short fiction from the Caribbean's up and coming voices. Edited by writer Karen Lord, New Worlds, Old Ways encompasses science fiction, fantasy and more. It is the third publication of Peekash Press, an imprint of Akashic Books and Peepal Tree Press committed to supporting the emergence of new Caribbean writing, and as part of CaribLit project.Do not be misled by the ‘speculative’ in the title. Although there may be robots and fantastical creatures, these common symbols are tools to frame the familiar from fresh perspectives.Here you will find the recent past and ongoing present of government and society with curfews, crime and corruption; the universal themes of family with parents and children, growth and death, love and hate; the struggle to thrive when power is capricious and revenge too bittersweet. Here too is the passage of everything – old ways, places, peoples, and ourselves – leaving nothing behind but memories, histories, stories.This anthology speaks to the fragility of our Caribbean home, but reminds the reader that although home may be vulnerable, it is also beautifully resilient. The voice of our literature declares that in spite of disasters, this people and this place shall not be wholly destroyed.Read for delight, then read for depth, and you will not be disappointed.Edited by Karen Lord, with stories by Tammi-Browne Bannister, Summer Edward, Portia Subran, Brandon O’Brien, Kevin Jared Hosein, Richard B. Lynch, Elizabeth J. Jones, Damion Wilson, Brian Franklin, Ararimeh Aiyejina and H.K. Williams.
£8.23
Peepal Tree Press Ltd A Swarthy Boy
Edgar Mittelholzer’s autobiography, first published in 1963, which covers the first eighteen years of his life, was his first return in writing to about his native Guyana, of memory and imagination, for a good many years. Born into a household that regarded itself as European, in Guyana’s second town of New Amsterdam on the edge of orentyne, Mittelholzer writes with vivid feeling about what it was like to be a boy whose “swarthiness” was anathema to his bigoted father. But what most distinguishes his account of this painful experience is his empathetic attempt to understand the tensions that drove his father’s attitudes. In the process, Mittelholzer gives an account of his family that is frank and searching and an account of the role of race, class and gender in small-town colonial life that is unrivalled in its perception. He writes memorably, for instance, of the ambivalence expressed by family members towards their neighbouring and very successful Indo-Guyanese family, the Luckhoos, and the tortured sensibility of the “coloured” middle class strung out between Black and White. A Swarthy Boy is also an attempt to trace the origins of the man Mittelholzer thought he had become, the division he felt within himself between the sensitive soul and the militant fighter, the Idyll and the Warrior – a division that he portrays in a good many of his most intimately observed characters. Despite being written only a couple of years before his fiery suicide, A Swarthy Boy was written with zest, not a little humour and some affection for the world he left to become a professional writer in Britain. This new edition has an introduction by Juanita Cox and an afterword by Jacqueline Ward, Edgar Mittelholzer’s second wife, who was with him at the time of writing A Swarthy Boy.
£11.25
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Reader I Married Him & Other Queer Goings On
From the first poem to the last, Smartt's new chapbook collection advocates a revolutionary decampment from the madhouse of desires "reigned in" to protect a precarious and often incoherent code of Caribbean respectability. This is Smartt at her sensual and lyrical best. These poems sing, and dance and love passionately 'til morning cum. From the hazardous terrain of same-sex loving in Jamaica for some couples, to the manipulation of heterosexual marriage conventions in Barbados in the name of love, to the freedom of sexual abandon and the fulfilment of desire in Amsterdam, this small body of work is subversive, radical, and surprisingly panoramic. Smartt's cartography renders new the old directive that we love each other, that we build and sustain community, that we protect and care for each other's needs, desires and dreams. Ultimately, Reader, I Married Him & Other Queer Goings On is about Black diasporic love at its most radical and life-affirming.
£6.41
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Una Marson: Selected Poems
Una Marson is widely recognised as 'the earliest female poet of significance to emerge in West Indian literature', but whilst her role as an early feminist and a 'first woman' publisher, broadcaster, pan-Africanist and anti-racist features on many web pages, her poetry has received less considered critical attention.This may be because her work is very diverse, even seemingly contradictory. She is a Jamaican poet who pioneered the articulation of gender and racial oppression, brought Jamaican vernacular voices alongside a Wordsworthian passion for nature, and ventured to give subjectivity to the powerless and marginalised. Author of Afro-blues that draw on both African-American and Jamaican speech, and of folk monologues, she also wrote devotional sonnets and love lyrics within a distinctly un-modernist tradition. Marson's work as presented here is a complex subject, striving to answer the questions of how to write as a woman; as a black, modern, diasporic subject; for the poor and powerless. As Donnell's extensive selection shows, and her introduction argues, Marson's is a significant poetic achievement.Una Marson is widely recognised as the earliest female poet of significance to emerge in West Indian literature
£10.99
Peepal Tree Press Ltd A Morning at the Office
Exploring the complicated landscape of human interaction within the walls of the offices of Essential Products Ltd., this serious yet comedic novel offers a glimpse into 1940s Trinidad. Against the backdrop of the often hierarchical and always complex office space, characters negotiate issues of sexual attraction and repulsion, their attitude to colonial rule, racial tensions, and the changing labor market of contemporary society. Filled with rich characters and an acute but sympathetic portrayal of a microcosm of middle- and lower-middle-class Trinidad, this satire turns a careful eye to the disparities between the world of the office and wider society.
£9.99
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Water with Berries
Teeton lives multiple lives in England. One is with a bohemian group of artist exiles, like his friend Derek the actor who has sunk to playing a corpse on state, and his rival Roger Capildeo, a Naipaulian figure who denies the point of any kind of political involvement. There is also Teeton's curiously intimate relationship with his English landlady, who he calls the Dowager. Finally, as a secret revolutionary from the Caribbean island of San Cristobal, Teeton is enmeshed in conspiracy. Thus far, Teeton has kept each aspect of his life separate from one another, but when he actively plans to return home and joins an incipient revolt, his once separate worlds begin to fuse together with disastrous results. This novel is a powerful study of the impossibility of disentangling British and Caribbean lives, the unacknowledged power of history, the nature of misogyny, and the conflict between the calls of art and revolution. In a narrative that is both deeply political and poetic, Water with Berries shows why George Lamming has been recognised as one of Caribbean writing's most original figures.
£11.95
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Black Midas
Aron Smart is orphaned early and brought up by his grandparents who impress on him the virtues of education. When they too die, his only support comes from an anonymous benefactor who turns out to be a white man who was an associate of Aron's father, a famous pork-knocker (gold and diamond prospector) who supports Aron out of guilt from his responsibility for Aron's father's death. But Aron's education is never completed and while he is always more educated than his working class companions, he remains less educated than the educated middle class and this contributes to his sense of division. After a period working for an Indian doctor and having an unsatisfactory affair with the daughter, Indra, for whom he is always inferior as a black man, Aron follows in his father's footsteps as a pork-knocker. He is immensely successful and becomes the legendary 'Shark', in a wild, untamed world of drinkers, get-rich-quick and lose-it-quick prospectors and the whores who haunt the diamond fields. With one, Belle, there is a relationship of a kind, but his attempt to use his wealth to buy into the middle-class and take Belle with him fails disastrously. Cheated of his fortune, he returns to the interior, mining with a reckless madness that ends in his maiming. He cannot find himself, though he dreams of returning to the life of his grandfather in the solidity of land and farming. Black Midas can be read as Carew's warning of what might happen in the postcolonial era. The house that Shark buys in Georgetown is so filled for him with the ghosts of its former white occupants that he can never really take possession of it and is condemned to mimic the ways of the former rulers. Though Shark's Eldoradean quest ends in grief, on the way there is energy, outrageous sensuality and deeply felt engagement with the Guyanese landscape, particularly of the interior.Jan Carew was born in the village of Agricola in Berbice, Guyana in 1920
£8.99