©Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Born in Ghana in 1962, Kwame Dawes spent most of his childhood and early adult life in Jamaica . As a poet, he is profoundly influenced by the rhythms and textures of that lush place, citing in a recent interview his "spiritual, intellectual, and emotional engagement with reggae music." His book Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius remains the most authoritative study of the lyrics of Bob Marley.
His 11th collection of verse, Wisteria: Poems From the Swamp Country, was published in January 2006. In February, 2007 Akashic Books published his novel, She's Gone and Peepal Tree Books published his 12th collection of poetry, Impossible Flying, and his non-fiction work, A Far Cry From Plymouth Rock: A Personal Narrative.

His essays have appeared in numerous journals including Bomb Magazine, The London Review of Books, Granta, Essence, World Literature Today and Double Take Magazine.

In October, 2007, his thirteenth book of poems, Gomer's Song will appear on the Black Goat imprint of Akashic Books. Dawes has seen produced some twenty of his plays over the past twenty-five years including, most recently a production of his musical, One Love, at the Lyric Hammersmith in London .

Kwame Dawes is Distinguished Poet in Residence, Louis Frye Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts and Founder and executive Director of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative. He is the director of the University of South Carolina Arts Institute and the programming director of the Calabash International Literary Festival, which takes place in Jamaica in May of each year. Kwame Dawes is a regular blogger for the Poetry Foundation, his blogs can be read at www.poetryfoundation.org   Kawme's father Neville Dawes was an accomplished author as well..

 

 

Hold Me to an Island: Caribbean Place: An Anthology of Writing
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Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: Peepal Tree Press Ltd. (February 1, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1845231635
ISBN-13: 978-1845231637

Exploring the relationships between the Caribbean people and their environment, this anthology brings together poetry, fiction, and other pieces of prose that focus on the Caribbean’s natural and manmade environments with an insider point of view. The writings are divided by relating to various places, including constructed, intimate, and natural ones, in addition to the flora and fauna of the region, which has, in some cases, taken on iconic significance. This collection gives a true insight into both the Caribbean landscape and its corresponding mindscape.

This anthology brings together poetry, fiction and other prose that explores the relationship between Caribbean people and their environment, both man-made and natural. The anthology deals with constructed places such as the plantation, the village and the city, intimate places such as houses and yards, and natural ones such as the sea and wilderness. The last section focuses on the idea of journeying as a matter of personal transformation.

 

Wheels
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Paperback: 120 pages
Publisher: Peepal Tree Press Ltd. (December 1, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1845231422
ISBN-13: 978-1845231422

Using the power of language to explore and discover patterns of meaning, this collection brings the lyric poem face to face with the external world—with its politics, social upheavals, and ideological complexity. Whether it is a poem about a near victim of a terrorist attack reflecting on the nature of grace, a president considering the function of art, or a Rastafarian defending his faith, the selections all seek illumination in understanding the world. They are as much about the quest for love and faith as they are about finding pathways of meaning through the current decade of wars and political and economic uncertainty.

 

Back of Mount Peace
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Paperback: 96 pages
Publisher: Peepal Tree Press Ltd. (April 1, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1845231244
ISBN-13: 978-1845231248
Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.3 inches

A retired fisherman, Monty Cupidon, encounters a naked, bloodied and traumatised woman standing at the cross-roads. He offers comfort and takes her in. Suffering from amnesia, she cannot tell him anything about herself.

The only clues are the signs that she has once worn a wedding ring, has a butterfly tattoo and red nail polish on her toes. In the absence of memory, he names her Esther. So begins a remarkable sequence of poems that explores many dimensions of liminality. Back of Mount Peace occupies a space between lyric and narrative, between reflection and story. It explores the space between body and mind, making Esther’s halting discovery of her self through her body, which like a tree bears its indelible history and, unlike the mind, ‘doesn’t forget its grievances’, work both as moving narrative device and a deeply sensed and sensual reminder of the physicality of existence.

Above all, this is a sequence that explores a relationship which begins in a primal
Edenic space of innocent discovery in which, as Monty hopes, ‘the hallelujah’s of new love will begin’, but which, like all relationships must enter history, the decay of time and the corruptions of knowledge.

In the use of rhyme and other patterns of sound, Back of Mount Peace shows an
exceptional delicacy of formal control that constantly reinforces the poem’s insights and moving conclusions.

 

She's Gone
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Paperback: 350 pages
Publisher: Akashic Books (February 1, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1933354186
ISBN-13: 978-1933354187
Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 1.1 inches

A prominent Jamaican reggae singer falls in love with an African American woman while on tour in South Carolina. The two struggle to forge a relationship across a cultural and psychological divide in a story that spans from Jamaica to South Carolina to New York City.

 

Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius
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Paperback: 368 pages
Publisher: Bobcat Books (October 1, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0825673526
ISBN-13: 978-0825673528
Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 4.9 x 1.3 inches

This in-depth analysis of the reggae superstar’s poetry in lyric form delves into the songwriter’s intellect and spirituality with scholarly precision usually more associated with Bob Dylan or John Lennon. Thought of as the folk poet of the developing world, Marley influenced generations of musicians and writers throughout the Western hemisphere. He was a performer who held true to his heritage, yet is still awarded the status of world rock star. Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius features interviews with key people and musicians who knew the man. It’s the perfect companion to Bob Marley’s recordings. Previously published by Sanctuary.

 

Gomer's Song (Black Goat)
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Paperback: 72 pages
Publisher: Akashic Books (September 1, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1933354445
ISBN-13: 978-1933354446
Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.2 inches

Gomer's Song is a reinterpretation of a Bible story. Gomer, a harlot, was the wife of the Old Testament prophet Hosea. But even after marriage to Hosea, she refused to conform to her expected role. In Gomer, poet Kwame Dawes finds the subject for a beautiful contemporary exploration on the cost of arriving at freedom with an uneasy grace.

Dawes examines the insidious nature of power, the expectations of gender roles, and the limits of protest. Through Gomer's journey, we are asked to consider how each one of us must articulate not only our own defiance, but tally the costs of earning our individuality. Gomer's Song is a great fable for finding our humanity in the confusion of a post-9/11 world. This is tender a book with profound lyrical insights.

Reading level: Ages 4-8

 

I Saw Your Face
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Hardcover: 32 pages
Publisher: Dial (December 29, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0803718942
ISBN-13: 978-0803718944
Product Dimensions: 11.4 x 10 x 0.4 inches

Before Tom Feelings passed away in August of 2003, he had been working on a picture book with his friend, poet Kwame Dawes. As Kwame explains, "One day, Tom gave me a folder of drawings of young people from his journeys around the world. I saw a story of resilience and pride, and wrote my poem as a response." These wonderful drawings, paired with lyrical text, offer a fresh encounter with one of our most evocative illustrators.

 

Requiem
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Paperback: 48 pages
Publisher: Peepal Tree Press Ltd. (November 1, 1996)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1900715074
ISBN-13: 978-1900715072
Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.2 inches

In these "shrines of remembrance" for the millions of the victims of transatlantic slavery, Kwame Dawes constructs a sequence which laments, rages, mourns, but also celebrates survival.

Focusing on individual moments in this holocaust which lasted nearly four hundred years, these poems both cauterize a lingering infection and offer the oil of healing

In these taut lyric pieces, Dawes achieves what might seem impossible: saying something fresh about a subject which, despite attempts at historical amnesia, will not go away. He does it by eschewing sentimentality, rant or playing to the audience, black or white. His poems go to the heart of the historical experience and its contemporary reverberations.

This sequence was inspired by the award-winning book by the American artist Tom Feelings. The cover illustration is by Tom Feelings

 

Bivouac
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Paperback: 260 pages
Publisher: Peepal Tree Press Ltd. (March 1, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1845231058
ISBN-13: 978-1845231057
Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches

A sharply focused portrayal of Jamaica at a tipping point in its recent past, this story of one man's private grief and dislocation explores the psyche of a nation and a cultural movement that has lost its footing. When Ferron Morgan’s family is thrown in turmoil by the suspicions surrounding the mysterious death of his father, his life is swept away in a tide of guilt and filial duty. Narrated in a nonlinear fashion with cycles of flash-back, the story suggests that the answers to the future can only be surmised once the past has been revisited.

 

Prophets (Peepal Tree Caribbean Poetry)
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Paperback: 160 pages
Publisher: Peepal Tree Press Ltd. (September 1, 1998)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0948833858
ISBN-13: 978-0948833854
Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches

As 24-hour television, belching out the swaggering 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. Clarice's visions give her power; Thalbot is at the mercy of every wandering spirit. 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...

 

Wisteria
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Paperback: 96 pages
Publisher: Red Hen Press (January 1, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 159709059X
ISBN-13: 978-1597090599
Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.4 inches

Here are the voices of women who lived through most of the twentieth century - teachers, beauticians, seamstresses, domestic workers and farming folk - unfold with the raw honesty of people who have waited for a long time to finally speak their mind. The poems move with the narrative force of stories long repeated but told with fresh emotion each time, with the lyrical depth of a blues threnody or a negro spiritual, and with the flame and shock of a prophet forced to speak the hardest truths.

 

Jacko Jacobus
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Paperback: 159 pages
Publisher: Peepal Tree Press Ltd. (January 1, 1996)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1900715066
ISBN-13: 978-1900715065
Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.5 inch

Poor sower of seeds with a gift for dreaming, Jacko Jacobus knows that his destiny is to found a people to shake the nations. But when he has to flee Jamaica to escape his brother's wrath, he finds himself pushing crack for his Uncle Al in South Carolina.

In writing his dub version of the myth of Jacob and Esau, Kwame Dawes builds on a gripping narrative of prophecy, love, deceit and murder to address contemporary Caribbean realities; and in portraying the conflict between Jacko's trickster, anancy inventiveness and the narrow righteousness of his brother Eric's path, he explores the universal tensions between Jacko's sense of duty and his desire to make his own way; whatever the consequences.

 

A Far Cry from Plymouth Rock: A Personal Narrative
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Paperback: 160 pages
Publisher: Peepal Tree Press Ltd. (April 1, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1845230256
ISBN-13: 978-1845230258
Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.7 x 0.6 inches

Directly addressing the relationship with his father, a Marxist Caribbean nationalist, Kwame Dawes presents a memoir of intellectual rigor that is coupled with great tenderness. With the immediacy of a man thinking aloud and the careful structure of art that recalls the places that have molded his life—from Ghana and Jamaica to Canada and America—Dawes explores the nearly universal conditions of migrants. Ultimately about the joys of personal differences, this autobiography is a touching look into the life of a son, husband, and father.

 

Shook Foil
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Paperback: 75 pages
Publisher: Peepal Tree Press Ltd. (December 1, 1997)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1900715147
ISBN-13: 978-1900715140
Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.3 inches

When the guitars tickle a bedrock of drum and bass, when the girl a shock out and a steady hand curve round her sweat-smooth waist, when the smell of Charlie mingles with the chemicals of her hair and the groove is of the sweetest friction... how is a young man to keep his way pure

Kwame Dawes' poetry rises to new heights in these psalms of confession and celebrations of reggae's power to prophesy, to seek after righteousness and seduce the body and mind. Here is poetry walking the bassline, which darts sweetly around the rigid lick of the rhythm guitar yet expresses all the sadness and alienation at the heart of reggae. This, for Dawes, is the earth which 'never tells me my true home' and where behind every chekeh of the guitar there is the ancestral memory of the whip's crack.

Shook Foil dramatises the conflict between the purity of essences and the taints of the actual, not least in the poems which focus on Bob Marley's life. Here is the rhygin, word-weaving prophet and the philanderer with the desperate hunger for yard pumpum, the revealer of truths and the buffalo soldier who has married yard with show biz affluence

Above all there is the intense sadness of Marley's death, for how can one live without the duppy conqueror's defiant wail in an island gone dark for the passing of his song

But for Shook Foil there is always the gospeller's hope that the dead will rise from dub ruins and patch a new quilt of sound for the feet to prance on. And when the high hat shimmering and the bass drum thumping, what else to do but dance?

 

Midland: Poems
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Paperback: 103 pages
Publisher: Ohio University Press; 1 edition (February 14, 2001)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0821413562
ISBN-13: 978-0821413562
Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6 x 3.6 inches

This is the seventh collection of poetry by Kwame Dawes. It draws deeply on the poet's travels and experiences in Africa, the Caribbean, England, and the American South, and is a compelling meditation on what is given and taken away in the acts of generation and influence.

 

Talk Yuh Talk: Interviews with Anglophone Caribbean Poets
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Paperback: 244 pages
Publisher: University of Virginia Press (December 1, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0813919460
ISBN-13: 978-0813919461
Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 0.7 inches

Before the Caribbean-inflected spoken-word poetry of the 1990s, epitomized by poetry slams at the Nuyorican Poets Café in Manhattan, there was reggae. In the past thirty years, most Caribbean poetry written in English has come to the shores of the United States on waves of music, in the lyrics of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Burning Spear. Kwame Dawes, himself a musician and poet, is not surprised by this phenomenon. The region's political and cultural awakening of the 1970s was fueled by a growing African consciousness, often in competition with the multiple traditions--European, Indian, Chinese--that have permeated many Caribbean nations for centuries. The influence of reggae has produced a poetry that is quite different from earlier work from the Caribbean, but this is only one more chapter in a tradition characterized by continuing tension with a diverse heritage.

The interviews in Talk Yuh Talk reflect a range of Caribbean voices from several generations, from those poets influenced by a dynamic interplay between the popular culture of reggae, calypso, folk music, and "yard" theater to those whose work is closer to classical forms of literature and oral narrative. Kwame Dawes talks with many of the most important poets to have emerged from the Caribbean who are still writing today. The poets discuss their techniques, their situations as poets, and the challenges they face in the profession and in their craft. Well-known figures like Lorna Goodison, Grace Nichols, Kamau Brathwaite, Fred D'Aguiar, and Martin Carter share space with such lesser-known but equally important poets as Mervyn Morris and Kendel Hippolyte.

In a specific introduction to each poet, Dawes offers a sense of what is important or meaningful about the poet's work. He explores detachment with Mervyn Morris, intellectual rigor with David Dabydeen, the struggles of obscurity with Cyril Dabydeen, the poetics of surprise and the erotic with Grace Nichols, the reggae escape motif with Lillian Allen, ambivalence about Africa with James Berry, and more, talking with eighteen poets in all. By allowing them to speak in their own voices and by directing the questions along the lines of creative process and aesthetics, Dawes makes a compelling case for the strength of Caribbean poetry while offering a lively source of inspiration and information for practicing poets as well as critics.

 

Resisting the Anomie
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Paperback: 112 pages
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions (March 1, 1995)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0864921470
ISBN-13: 978-0864921475
Product Dimensions: 7 x 5.8 x 0.4 inches

Resisting the Anomie is the second book of poetry by Kwame Dawes, whose collection Progeny of Air, won Britain's prestigious Forward Trust Poetry Prize for Best First Book in the fall of 1994. In Resisting the Anomie, Dawes takes as his subject the anxiety of being far from home, the unease of not belonging, the sense of disconnection from culture and custom. Poems of Jamaica, of Canada, of Haiti; tightly controlled poems, wild and free poems, reggae poems; poems of rejoicing, of faith, love, anger and humour -- Resisting the Anomie is a large collection of substantial works by a new and significant writer.

 

One Love (Modern Plays)
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Paperback: 96 pages
Publisher: Methuen Drama (July 5, 2001)
ISBN-10: 041376530X
ISBN-13: 978-0413765307

A new play for Britain's leading black theatre company, with a premiere at London's Lyric Theatre in July 2001 Hot, humid, downtown Kingston, Jamaica. The 1970s. Streets pulse with reggae, rhythm and dub. Brotherman is a local Rastafarian guru who heals, preaches and tries hard to live a righteous life. When he gives a homeless young country girl a space in his house, the volatile neighbourhood is sparked into jealousy and violence. Meanwhile, her growing love for him tests his commitment to a pure, spiritual life.Commissioned by Talawa, Britain's leading black theatre company, and inspired by Roger Mais' classic novel Brotherman, One Love takes us to the heart of the Jamaican soul, as actors, dancers, singers, live musicians and a DJ draw on influences such as Bob Marley and Lee 'Scratch' Perry to tell this powerful parable of desire and denial.

 

Dawes is included in the following anthologies:

 

So Much Things to Say: 100 Poets from the First Ten Years of the Calabash International Literary Festival
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Editors Kwame Dawes & Colin Channer

Paperback: 275 pages
Publisher: Akashic Books (July 1, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1936070073
ISBN-13: 978-1936070077
Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches 

Contributors include: Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, Elizabeth Alexander, Amiri Baraka, Martin Espada, Terrance Hayes, Valzyna Mort, Sonia Sanchez, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Patricia Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Staceyann Chin, and 88 others.

Imagine a night of a hundred poets reading their work to an audience of intensely engaged, responsive, and lively people--say three thousand of them. They are a loud bunch when it is time to make noise, but they are silent as congregants at prayer when the poets' language entrances them. Imagine the reading taking place under a tent pitched on a grassy lawn that overlooks the Caribbean Sea. Imagine that this is not the north coast of Jamaica, with its cliche of white sands and coconut trees, a place glutted with cruise ship passengers and bewildered tourists; imagine instead a rugged coastline, a landscape full of the kind of character we find in the weather-beaten faces of wise old folk; imagine fishermen, farmers, ordinary workers, schoolchildren, and traveling people moving around as if they have been in this place forever and as if they all belong . . .

Imagine one hundred poets, some whose names you know and some you have never heard of, stepping onto the stage, opening their mouths and hearts, and singing out poems of great variety, complexity, beauty, and passion . . . Imagine laughter and tears, imagine sighs of familiarity and moans of pain, imagine tragedies enacted in the words that move through the shelter of the tent; imagine a poem like a fist, or a sharply painful open palm, or the tender caress of fingers, or the firm grasp of a handshake. Imagine stories dropping like seeds into the ground and growing rapidly and wildly all around you.

This is the setting and mood of the greatest little festival in the greatest little village in the greatest little country in the world, and this anthology is what the festival would look like were all 100 poets who have read at Calabash over the years to come together on a late-May weekend to read. So Much Things to Say is a unique gathering of a group of poets who represent at least one reckoning of the place of contemporary poetry in 2010.

 

Kingston Noir
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Edited by Colin Channer

Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Akashic Books (May 29, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1617750743
ISBN-13: 978-1617750748
Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.3 inches

 

Read an AALBC.com Book Review

Original stories by: Marlon James, Kwame Dawes, Patricia Powell, Colin Channer, Marcia Douglas, Leone Ross, Kei Miller, Christopher John Farley, Ian Thomson, Thomas Glave, and Chris Abani.

From Trench Town to Half Way Tree to Norbrook to Portmore and beyond, the stories of Kingston Noir shine light into the darkest corners of this fabled city. Joining award-winning Jamaican authors such as Marlon James, Leone Ross, and Thomas Glave are two "special guest" writers with no Jamaican lineage: Nigerian-born Chris Abani and British writer Ian Thomson. The menacing tone that runs through some of these stories is counterbalanced by the clever humor in others, such as Kei Miller's “White Gyal with a Camera,” who softens even the hardest of August Town’s gangsters; and Mr. Brown, the private investigator in Kwame Dawes’s story, who explains why his girth works to his advantage: "In Jamaica a woman like a big man. She can see he is prosperous, and that he can be in charge." Together, the outstanding tales in Kingston Noir comprise the best volume of short fiction ever to arise from the literary wellspring that is Jamaica.

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