Fugue and Other Writings

Combining poetry, short stories, autobiographical essays, and critical writing, this comprehensive collection grants unrivaled access to an individual’s passage through a rural Jamaican childhood, his literary influences, and involvement and frustration with postcolonial politics. In all manners of writing, including pieces that have never seen print before, his range and full vision are finally exposed in this compilation that demonstratively reveals Neville Dawes as an important and visionary critic on the development of Caribbean writing, the place of Africa in Caribbean culture, and the importance of seeing the region as a unified whole across language barriers.

Introduced in an essay that brings both a scholar’s objective placement of this work in the context of Jamaican and Caribbean writing as well as a son’s (Kwame Dawes) moving and insightful response to his father’s work in relation to the triumphs and struggles of his own life, this invaluable and emotional anthology proves the touching and unrelenting qualities of an influential writer.