71 Books Published by Peepal Tree Press on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Roger Robinson’s range is wide: the joys and pains of family life; the ubiquitous presence of racism; observations on the threatening edge of violence below the surface energies of Black British territories in London; 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; and reflections on the purposes and costs of making art.

Not least, in the sequence of poems that reflect on the meanings of the Grenfell Tower fire, Roger Robinson finds ways to move beyond a just indignation to uncover the undertones of experience that bring us nearer to the human reality of that event. The collection’s title points to the underlying philosophy expressed in these poems: that earthly joy is, or ought to be, just within, but is often just beyond our reach, denied by racism, misogyny, physical cruelty, and those with the class power to deny others their share of worldly goods and pleasures.

A Portable Paradise is not the emptiness of material accumulation, but joy in an openness to people, places, the sensual pleasures of food, and the rewards to be had from the arts of word, sound, and visual enticement—in short an “insatiable hunger” for life. The poems express a fierce anger against injustice, but also convey the irrepressible sense that Roger Robinson cannot help but love people for their humor, oddity, and generosity of spirit. These finely crafted poems reveal Roger Robinson’s capacity to tell involving stories and capture the essence of a character in a few words, to move the emotions with the force of verbal expression, and to engage our thoughts. A Portable Paradise is a feast to be carried by lovers of poetry wherever they go.

When Speak from Here to There was published in 2016 it was, remarkably, doing something quite new. There are of course the conversations implied in the poems of Coleridge and Wordsworth, but no two poets had committed to, in the words of Will Harris, the almost daily “structure of call-and-response, each utterance is filtered through the other.”

This richly multi-layered dialogue arises from responses to each poet’s public world, to the private worlds of family, to the inner world of wondering how one can write “love poems in a time of war, these times of monstrous beasts,” and from the stimulus of the other’s poem arriving in the e-mail in-tray. Though both poets express their anxieties about the limitations of the prophetic, there is the countervailing witness of their immensely fertile imaginative response to each other’s words and the comfort that “On the road, you long for the like-minded” is a longing that is being fulfilled.

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.

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. Jacob Ross often holds up to us a much darker place, as in “Rum and Coke” where a mother rails against the sway the local dealer has over her addicted son and does something about it. Tell No One About This will confirm Ross as amongst the very best short story writers in the Caribbean and the UK.

In 2011, the Trinidad government declared a state of emergency and an overnight curfew. The SoE, brought in to combat the crime and killings associated with the drugs trade, was meant to last 15 days but lasted four months. This is the background to these chronicles, but not their substance. They are an imaginative response to the undertones of those days. Taking place over 24 hours, Curfew Chronicles brings together, like a Joyce’s Ulysses in miniature, the lives of two dozen characters (including a father and son searching for each other) whose lives intersect in mostly fortuitous but sometimes quite deliberate ways.

From headless schoolgirls, to talking food and threesomes, pretty much anything can happen in these witty, weird and wonderful short stories by Leone Ross. Ranging from flash fiction to intense psychological drama, magical realism, horror and erotica, these strange, clever, frank and sometimes very funny stories have a serious side too. Carefully crafted over 15 years, they explore unbounded sexualities, a vision of the fluidity of the person, and politics – from the deaths of black people at the hands of the police, to the deep shifts that signal the subtle changes in the nature of capitalism and much more. These stories may sometimes tickle, sometimes shock; but will always engage both the intellect and the heart.

Secrets can be buried, but bones can speak… When Michael (Digger) Digson is recruited into DS Chilman’s new plain clothes squad in the small Caribbean island of Camaho he brings his own mission to discover who amongst a renegade police squad killed his mother in a political demonstration. Sent to London to train in forensics, Digger becomes enmeshed in Chilman’s obsession with a cold case – the disappearance of a young man whose mother is sure has been murdered.

A much-awaited novel from an award-winning writer a reggae track of ancestral memory and the inexorable search for freedom.  
Bob Marley is dead.  The Emperor Haile Selassie has been brutally murdered.  The armed gangs of Kingston are at war and the murder rate soars.  The people have lost all trust in self-serving politicians.  It is hard to imagine worse times. 
The Marvellous Equations of the Dread: A Novel in Bass Riddim tells the twin stories of Jamaica’s nihilistic violence and its wondrously creative humanity and does truthful justice to both.  It takes place in the worlds of the living and in the vivid afterlife of the dead, spanning Kingston ghettoes, the Emperor’s palace in Addis Ababa, and Zion.  There is even a fallen angel.
At its heart are the human stories of deaf Leenah who with her mother and daughter writes a powerful woman version of events; the relationship between Fall-down (a street madman and fallen angel) and Delroy an orphaned street-boy; and the meetings in the clock tower at Half Way Tree between Bob Marley, Marcus Garvey and the island’s dead.  But before all of this, there is the enslaved boy who was hung from the silk cotton tree in 1766.  The novel sets out to retrieve the word at the tip of his tongue. 
Not the least of the novel’s marvellous equations are the dread revenants who encourage the living to take responsibility for the future of the nation.

Longlisted:
2017 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature

Jamaican poet, Ann Margaret Lim, follows her critically acclaimed debut collection, The Festival of Wild Orchid, with an exciting new volume, Kingston Buttercup, a work of fierce honesty, social awareness and lyric complexity. Bocas Poetry Prize winner, Loretta Collins Klobah, writes: "In Kingston Buttercup, her marvelous second book, Ann-Margaret Lim’s fresh, honest, and tenderly-fierce perspective comes through in highly readable lyric poems."

Teeton lives multiple lives in England. One is with a bohemian group of Caribbean artist exiles; another is his curiously intimate mother-son relationship with his English landlady. He is also enmeshed in a revolutionary conspiracy to overthrow a reactionary Caribbean government.

Teeton keeps each aspect of his life in compartments but when the revolt begins, his once separate worlds begin to fuse together with disastrous results.

Perhaps the most famous writer to emerge from the island of Barbados, the now grandfatherly George Lamming was born on June 8, 1927. Though he grew up on the island, like so many West Indian writers he eventually left, emigrating to England in 1950. There, after spending some time working in a factory and broadcasting for the BBC, Lamming became a leader in a Caribbean renaissance that took place in England, along with other exiles like V.S. Naipaul.

Longlisted:
2017 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature

When the infant Jordan Sant is taken to the St Asteria Home for Children after the murder of his parents, he sets out on a journey that is a constant struggle between his best and worst selves. One relationship, with the young nun the children call Mouse, awakens the possibilities of love and hope, but when Mouse abandons her calling and leaves the home, the world thereafter becomes a darker place. When, barely a teenager, he runs away from the home to scuffle for a living in the frightening underbelly of Port of Spain, Jordan reaches the lower depths of both Trinidadian society and himself.

For six months during 2015, two poets known for their capacity to create lyric responses to the complex realities around them, yet poets fully inscribed in both a western literary tradition and other longer traditions that have been marginalized, exchanged poems that were in constant dialogue even as they remained wholly defined and shaped by the details of their own private and public lives.

Kwame Dawes’ base was flat prairieland of Lincoln, Nebraska, a mid-American landscape in which he, a black man, felt at once alien and curiously committed to the challenges of finding home; and John Kinsella’s base was in the wide open violently beautiful landscape of western Australia, his home ground, thick with memory and heavy with the language of ecological change, political ineptitude and artistic defiance.

E-mail was the bridge. These two poets found themselves in the middle of the swirl of political and social upheavals in their spheres.

Beginning with the promptings of the transgressively erotic title story, Jacqueline Bishop came to see the hybrid format of this book, with its mix of short stories, essays and interviews could begin to encompass her desire to see where she had arrived at in a creative career that encompassed being published as a novelist, poet, critic and exhibited as an artist. How did these sundry positions connect together? What aspects of both conscious intention and unconscious, interior motivations did they reveal? The stories, none more than a few pages long, can be read at several levels. The mentor who teaches the child gymnast a contortionist’s erotic positions, the adoptive mother who shoots down ex-partner and adopted child when the former debauches the latter as the subject of pornographic photographs; the relationship between tattooist and the woman who offers her naked body for decoration are all sharply and persuasively realized as short fictions, but they also hint at a writer’s interior dialogue and can be read as parables about the relationship between the free imagination and the controlling and even potentially betraying power of art. The essays explore more conscious areas of expression. They deal with the experiences of maternal separation, family histories and mythologies, the search for grounding in the life of a Jamaican grandmother, the relationship with a male writing mentor, travel to Morocco, the inspiration of the writing lives of Jamaicans Claude McKay and Roger Mais and how 9/11 showed her how deeply she had become a New Yorker. The interviews, which investigate sometimes her writing, sometimes her art, and occasionally both, provide context for the stories and the essays. They are at their most revealing when interviewers ask Jacqueline Bishop questions she hasn’t asked herself.

The title of Wife is both ironic and deeply serious. There are wittily sharp poems on the gender inequalities and potential prisons of marriage, that are in dialogue with poems that celebrate the physical joys of intimacy, and poems that explore the processes of self-creation that take place in the closeness to the male other. Their context is a Virgin Islands’ past, a Black American present, and an enlarged human future.

From well-known and award-winning authors—including Bernardine Evaristo, Fred D’Aguiar, and Leone Ross—to previous unpublished writers, this ambitious and intriguing anthology of short stories showcases each author’s most challenging work. These works from writers who are happy to describe themselves as Black British, have a rich variety of styles, forms, and themes, from raw realism, the erotic, and elegant economy, to the fanciful, humorous, and the tender. The contributors to Closure display a keen awareness of the short story form in all its contemporary possibilities as a way of telling and finding a form for the writer’s vision. These are stories about the ways in which we do and do not love, unrequited yearnings, the quiet and often hidden violence in our lives, moments of epiphany, and the precious occasions of jubilation and uplift.

Winner of:
2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature

Vladimir Lucien is a young poet with so many gifts; his poetry is intelligent, musical, gritty in observation, graceful in method. His poems contain stories of ancestors, immediate family, the history embedded in his language choices as a St Lucian writer, and heroes such as Walter Rodney, C. L. R. James, Kamau Brathwaite, and a local steelbandsman. Although never overtly political, there’s an oblique and often witty politics embedded in the poems, as where observing the rise of a grandfather out of rural poverty into the style of colonial respectability, he writes of the man “who eat his farine and fish / and avocado in a civilize fight between / knife and fork and etiquette on his plate.” This is a collection that is alive with its conscious tensions both in subject matter and form. There’s a tension between the vision of ancestors, family, and of the poet himself as being engaged in the business of acting in the world and building on the past, and a sharp awareness of the inescapability of age’s frailty, the decay of memory and of death.

"Readers will enjoy this body of work because of its unconventional approach and Alleyne’s personal touch is just enough for readers to understand that she’s writing from the heart. Take the plunge and enjoy a piece of "Difficult Fruit"." —Leslie Haidez De Jesus, qbr.com

With his dexterity as a writer, Kendel Hippolyte speaks through and beyond tradition. He writes in sonnet, triolet, villanelle, and echo poem; in idiomatic dramatic monologues that capture the rhythms of Caribbean speech; in blues and rap poems; in free verse that draws upon the long-breath incantatory lines of Ginsberg and contracts in miniaturist forms as concise as graffiti. The rapturous linguistic energy of the poems invites us to look beyond the outward reality they contemplate to a more hopeful, if occluded, vision. It is the title poem of Kendel Hippolyte’s collection in which he lays down his ambitious challenge to himself and his reader: because we see with history, it is difficult to see through it; and yet we must or we become itbecome nothing else but history. In rising to meet it, Hippolyte draws upon all his verbal mastery and critical insight to draw sharp focus upon a nation in flux, where urbanization expands and fragments his home of St. Lucia. The poet turns his vision upon the people, the land and the culture, and finds a microcosm of the Caribbean in the 21st century, reminding us of the possibilities for renewal in the personal and everyday.

When Kei Miller describes these as essays and prophecies, he shares with the reader a sensibility in which the sacred and the secular, belief and scepticism, and vision and analysis engage in profound and lively debate. Two moments shape the space in which these essays take place. He writes about the occasion when as a youth who was a favoured spiritual leader in his charismatic church he found himself listening to the rhetoric of the sermons for their careful craft of prophecy; but when he writes about losing his religion, he recognises that a way of being and seeing in the world lives on - a sense of wonder, of spiritual empowerment and the conviction that the world cannot be understood, or accepted, without embracing visions that challenge the way it appears to be.

Alert to all the contradictions of contemporary Jamaica, these lyric and delicate poems find fresh things to say about the country’s landscapes and seascapes. Written in both standard Caribbean English and Jamaican patois with wit, an imaginative eye, and warmth, this collection presents a feisty and questioning poetic persona: one who responds frankly to the endemic violence, misogyny, and poverty of a divided society. Through pungent phrases and arresting images, this compilation not only reflects upon the poet’s Chinese and African heritages, but also celebrates the novelty of the world as discovered by her child.

A collection that brings to bear the memory of a pan-African homeland upon the reality of a British upbringing, this book unlocks stories—at times amusing and loving, at other times confusing and sad—that surround the “invisibility” of private fostering; the dislocations and negotiations of migration; and home as an imagined, remembered, and physical place. Exploring the idea of growing up black as one of the “Michael Jackson generation,” against the racially divided background of Britain in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, this poetry compilation also draws upon the poet’s travels to relate intimate childhood experiences.

In these essays, Rupert Roopnarainewho has been called a Caribbean Hazlittdisplays his sharp antennae for the spirit of the age and a prose style that is both elegant and intensely alive. A wide range of his interests are represented here, including literary and art criticism, political analysis, social commentary, memoirs, and tributes. Taken together, the material provides an overview of Roopnaraine’s 30-year political battle for democracy, social justice, racial harmony, and the creation of a cultivated civil society in Guyana and the wider Caribbean.

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.

* The futuristic Caribbean island of Jacaranda is a place under the constant pressures of crime, globalization, advancing technology and environmental decay. Under these ominous skies Curdella Forbes builds a compelling tale of love, murder and psychological mayhem - a forbidden, tragic love affair, and a family torn apart by injustice.

With verbal urgency and visionary imagination, this collection features the work of one of the Caribbean’s most important poets. Presenting what life is like on a small island, vulnerable to the wounded thrashings of world capitalism in crisisan island where livelihoods are destroyed at the flourish of a Brussel bureaucrat’s pen; where Paradise is a tourist cruise ship that reminds the people of their neocolonial status; and where global consumerism has poisoned the ambitions of the young into drugs, crime, and violencethese candid poems are a warning of the perils fragmenting societies and ecologies.

Against a soundtrack of world musicfrom salsa to reggae and jazzand in a vibrant blend of English, Spanish, and Patois, this collection delivers tender and incendiary hymns of homage to the Caribbean, American, and British metropolises. In a poetic form that is lyrical, narrative, sensual, and often experimental, it offers insight into the urgent social issues impacting the everyday world and its extraordinary people. As they seek connections across boundaries of geography, race, ethnicity, language, gender, age, and economic class, these poems express a hope for the future and the possibility for cultural metamorphosis.

Set primarily in the Bay Area of California, this compelling tale of human intent and divine manipulation touches upon the very inherent aspects of love, betrayal, madness, and reconciliation, all within the framework of the Yoruba belief system. Two modern, urban professionals—fundamentally unsuited to one another, aside from a powerful sexual chemistry—traverse life to the point of reaching the crossroads of divorce many years later. Dancing between the drama that unfolds between protagonists Crystal and Donald and the mirrored fantasy world of the Orishas where every human act has a spiritual ramification, this frank and intimate story revels in the multiple dimensions of the heart, mind, and soul.

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.

“…[Hurricane was] the book that made me want to write. He [Salkey] was the most wonderful writer for children.”—Zadie Smith

A lively illustrated masterpiece, this is the gripping story of a natural disaster and the 13-year-old Kingston boy who lives to tell the tale. While holed up in their home, Joe Brown, his sister Mary, and their parents wait for the eye of the hurricane to pass over their home. Outside, a terrifying wind turns trees to splinters, darkness swallows the land, and torrential rains lash the roof. Celebrating Jamaica’s resilience in the face of natural disasters, this account follows the family as they huddle, worry, wait, and hope together.

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.

Ricky Thomas, his brother Doug, and his sister Polly spend their summer holidays in the coffee walk surrounding their grandparents’ country home in Dallas, Jamaica. Above the children the leaves of the mango and coffee trees are drying, the thin asphalt is becoming syrupy beneath their feet, and the atmosphere is electric with the sun’s heat. While Ricky scouts for an observation platform for his imaginary island, the siblings feel the earth itself move beneath them. Is it part of their vivid imaginations, or is it the sign of a coming earthquake?

It is the dry season and the small village of Nain, Jamaica, is suffering. Its people, livestock, and crops have all been affected by the drought, and the outlook is bleak. But Seth Stone and his friends Man Boy, Benjie, Double Ugly, and Mango Head are determined to take matters into their own handswith unexpected results.

Exposing the political and cultural failure to address the challenges of postcolonial Trinidad, this insightful novel portrays a world where the working man must face the crime and violence that is destroying the social body. Walter Castle is dissatisfied with his regular job in the Laventille slum in Port of Spain. As the prospect of promotion is bleak and crime and lawless youth become insupportable, he dreams of going back to the village community he grew up in. Unfortunately, the force of nostalgia is not supported by actual memories and as Walter abandons his dreams he is forced to choose between turning into a drone who passes through life without leaving a mark, or standing up for himself. Originally published in 1965, this story remains surprisingly contemporary with its astringent critique of the top-down authoritarianism of nationalist politics.

Creating an impressionistic portrait of the poet’s boyhood in rural Jamaica, these narrative poems explore the West Indian distrust of European literature and mythology. Written in both traditional and formless verse, as well as in English and Jamaican patois, the book is structured as the spiritual journey of a poet-speaker caught between two worlds: one a benign culture of bush folk and the other a luminous but dangerous sea of myth. The speaker fears the land of myth because he is loyal to the bush people, but he also desires to transcend his physical and intellectual poverty. Little by little, the two cultures come together as the speaker begins grafting childhood memory to the world of imagination, shaped by books, art, music, and travel. At the core of the collection are several elegies to the poet’s grandmother, May, who encouraged his young creativity.

Characterized by a beautifully realized reciprocity between outer landscape and the characters’ inner worlds, this remarkable sequence of lyric poetry explores the blossoming of an innately complicated relationship between a retired fisherman named Monty Cupidon and a naked, bloodied, and traumatized woman he encounters standing at a crossroad who cannot remember who she is or where she came from. The only clues to her former identity are the signs that she once wore a wedding ring, has a butterfly tattoo on her shoulder, and wears red nail polish on her toes. Woven with the narrative elements of mystery and suspense, the poems examine the relationship?from its innocent beginning through the decay of time and into the eventual corruptions of knowledge. Showing an exceptional delicacy of formal control that constantly reinforces the poem’s insights and moving conclusions, the space between reflection and story, body and mind, and land and sea is examined as the couple begins to realize that in the very process of piecing their lives back together lies their relationship’s probable end.

A collection of imaginative and witty poems, this work displays astonishing energy; beauty of expression; and a range of reference to contemporary life, history, art, and literature. Including both meditative and narrative poems, this volume frequently focuses on extreme situations where compassion, love, and individual determination triumph against all odds. ?Daphne’s Lot” explores the life of an Englishwoman, the poet’s mother, as she is caught up in the madness of the Nigerian civil war, while ?Buffalo Women”?an epistolary sequence of poems?follows two lovers mired by the American Civil War. Through irony and empathy, this collection presents characters who are at odds with their societies.

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.

Inspired by the word ?red,” this collection of poems written by black British writers?including both established authors and new, exciting poets?explores the subjects and ideas stirred by a single trigger, from the word’s usual associations with blood, violence, passion, and anger, as well as with sensuality and sexuality, to more surprising interpretations such as the link to a particular mood, the quality of light in the sky, the color of skin, and the sound of a song. This remarkable compilation succeeds in generating poems that find an intriguing resonance with each other while also revealing images and themes unique to the individual poets.

Offering a richly nuanced portrayal placing Haiti in a global context as a place of ethnic and cultural complexity, this novel explores the role of spirituality in Caribbean life and culture. Told through multiple voices in a nonlinear fashion, the narrative unfolds through the perspectives of a Haitian-Syrian merchant, Ruth, who recounts her young adulthood and final days as she intuits her imminent death; Catherine, a professional pianist living in Paris who travels home to Haiti upon hearing of her Aunt Ruth’s murder; Rose, Catherine’s mother, an empath, who is believed to have committed suicide in Canadian exile in reaction to the worst years of the Duvalier regime; Romulus, a once famous Konpa singer and an addict, who, released by rebels from a Port-au-Prince jail searches for his redemption; and Elsie, an Irish, working-class seer who emigrates to Haiti in 1847 in search of a new mystic who will guide them all.

Traversing the terrains of Port-au-Prince middle-class life, working-class French Canada, expatriate Paris, the peat bogs of famine stricken Ireland, and tracing lives that cross boundaries of time and place, this is a deeply absorbing portrayal of a fragmented community whose deepest connections lie in a shared sense of spirituality.

Candid, honest, and empathetic, this disarming volume of poetry revels in poems that undress the foibles of family?from a father’s smallness to a mother’s ?fortissimo”?all located within the unique landscape of Barbados. Displaying a facility for the Barbadian dialect as well as lyrical West Indian English, the collection demonstrates the wit and intelligence of an artist committed to the use of verse to test the meaning of experience. Structured as a woman-centered movement of poems, the volume begins with the complex coming-of-age journey of a child and moves through an adulthood of romance and crushed emotions, the rewards and anxieties of motherhood, and the contemplative and reflective role of elder.

A brave and pioneering treatment of sexual identity in Caribbean literature, this novel, first published in 1960, follows the fortunes of Johnnie Sobert, a Jamaican exile who works in London at a club that caters to black American servicemen. In flight from his dominant, possessive mother, he immerses himself in the bohemian Soho scene and adopts a wisecracking persona as a cover for his deep-seated insecurities. Adding to Johnnie’s confusion is the fact that when he is not at work, he navigates a completely different life in Hempstead, where he lives in a bedsitter and carries on an unsatisfying affair with his white landlady, Fiona. These two worlds provide a lively portrait of Britons reacting to the growing presence of blacks and Asians in their neighborhoods, and Johnnie takes lessons from each place. By the time he finally decides to move in with his gay friend, Dick, he is much better equipped with self-awareness?but he has yet to make a decision about where his desires truly lie.

Sensual, honest, often humorous, and as intimate as a confession, the poems in this volume illuminate the struggle for self-definition and the journey of an exile. Weaving multiple narratives together, this work focuses on the delicate relationship between place and identity. While likening herself to the Roman poet Ovid and the traveling painter Gauguin and recounting a doomed romantic relationship, Bishop deals with her own hopes of home and her perceptions of otherness. Ultimately, these poems confront the need to rearrange both the words on page and the self.

Newly available after 40 years, this partly autobiographical love affair with the Jamaican language and landscape gives a penetrating look at the racial politics of the 1950s and 1960s and the search for self in a world divided by class. Ramsay Tull is witness to the black racial discontents and the desire for national independence that are threatening the old colonial order; but when a chance comes to study at Oxford University, he becomes immersed in European literary culture and Marxism. On his return to Jamaica, Ramsay becomes actively involved in radical nationalist politics and begins his second journey, away from his middle-class origins and back to a true appreciation of the Jamaican people.

Focusing on a sense of duty?to record family history, to envision wholeness out of fragments, and to dissolve the differences that prejudice may interpose between private and public selves?this rich collection of poetry hinges upon a sequence of poems that excavate the missing history of Samboo, an African slave brought from the Caribbean to the city of Lancaster in Lancashire, England. Drawing connections between present-day Lancaster and the foundations of its 18th-century prosperity in slave trading, the account places Samboo’s tragedy in the Lancaster landscape and text that offers a deeply personal response to the bicentennial of the abolition of the British slave trade. Contemporary poems provide both a counterpoint to the emptiness of Samboo’s too-soon curtailed life and echo a continuity of loss wrought by the fragmentation of Afro-Caribbean families through continuing migrations and death.

Drawing on a powerful sense of Trinidadian history and moving seamlessly between matters of family and matters of country, Jennifer Rahim s confessional and sensitive poems explore the threats and realities of fragmentationof psyche s, of family, and of a nation. With a balance of personal trauma, misery, and death with the cool, reflective nature of poetry, these pieces touch on topics such as family relationships and secrets, gender, abuse, and a troubled, fragile Caribbean."

Each piece in this dynamic poetic biography uses the voices of iconic figures past and present in a bold exploration of such hot topics as gender, race, and spirituality. The mode of presentation continually shifts—from dramatic monologue or prose poem, to prophetic rant—to provide fresh, moving viewpoints on subjects as various as the senility of a beloved grandmother and Michael Jackson’s racial transformations.

Crossing the space between novel & short fiction, ’A Permanent Freedom’ weaves nine individual stories about love, sex, death & migration into a single compelling narrative that seizes our imagination with the profound courage, integrity & folly of which the human spirit is capable.

Exceptionally expressive paintings from three contemporary Caribbean artistseach a prominent literary figure in Jamaicaare featured in this unusual collection. Abstract, evanescent webs by Jacqueline Bishop, sober still-life studies by Earl McKenzie, and landscape and figure paintings by Ralph Thompson provide vivid insight into the minds of these multitalented artists while continuing the long-standing tradition of transforming literary allusions into visual art.

Sensitive and imaginative, this collection of short stories explores the Jamaican male psyche through free-flowing narratives, stories within stories, and modern versions of folktales and myths. Structured around the author’s lifetime of experiences within a small Jamaican community, these touching stories explore modern issues relating to men?from the repercussions associated with absentee fathers to the creation of warm, loving home environments.

This engaging coming-of-age novel looks back over the idyllic Jamaican girlhood and the both alienating and transforming experience of winning a scholarship to the most prestigious girls’ boarding school on the island. Atypical of Caribbean literature because of its description of a young girl’s sexual awakening, the novel offers poetic descriptions of rural and urban Jamaica and delightful characterizations of warm and lively women, including the narrator’s mother, grandmother, and neighbors.

A satisfying and original work, this collection of poems offers moving personal insights as it reconstructs a Jamaican childhood from memory. Using striking metaphors drawn from the fauna and flora of Jamaica as well as images of painting as overarching devices, this volume explores the dichotomies of plentitude and emptiness, presence and absence, and nourishment and poison. Never allowing her longing for the island to become sentimental, the poet meticulously recreates her world in these heartfelt poems.

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.

Flamingo, a young writer in Jamaica, finds herself enmeshed in the world of her fictional characters in this inspiring and poetic novel about hope and the ravages of recent Jamaican economic and social upheavals. When poverty, emigration, and political turmoil in the fictional world oblige Flamingo’s characters to disperse, the one-eyed protagonist Alva solicits Flamingo’s help to bring them back together. The innovative novel is organized as a writers’ notebook and sprinkled with recipes, herbal remedies, dream interpretations, and various other interjections evoking the culture and traditions of Jamaica.

In this critical investigation of one of the Caribbean’s most distinguished artists, the work of Stanley Greaves is explored to explain his use of Guyanese physical reality and the various visual resources, including traditional African and Amerindian art and contemporary European surrealism, from which his work draws. Retrospective discussions of the different media in which Greaves worked cover sculpture, ceramic, figure paintings, and folk art. Also analyzed is his response to the years of political dictatorship and social collapse in Guyana in the 1980s, a political reality that emerges in his work.

This feisty, sensuous, and thought-provoking collection of poetry from Opal Palmer Adisa includes powerful poems about the solidarity of women, the female elders of the poet’s own family, and the desire for male difference?including the benefits of having a younger lover. In these poems there is no gap between the historical, the political, and the personal, all are defined by the presence or absence of the freedom to enjoy the fruits of life. Whether writing about history, family, black lives, love, or sexual passion, Opal Palmer Adisa has an acute eye for the contraries of experience. A number of poems exhibit a witty dance between food and sexuality?in one poem drinking coconut water becomes a sexual act, while in another, the male body is eroticized metaphorically in terms of a coconut palm. But within this focus on the physical, there is also a keen sense of the oppression of the female body. In her poem ?Bumbu Clat,” for example, she explores the deformation of a word that originally signified sisterhood to become part of the most misogynist curses in Jamaican society.

The personal becomes the public, the public the personal in poems which range over a deeply personalized sense of relationship to black history, to the black experience in Britain and to the manifold journeyings these have entailed.

Marcia Douglas, who was born in England and grew up in Jamaica, presents poems beginning with the image of the voicelessness of the country people who witness the coming of lights to Cocoa Bottom but have no one amongst them to record the event. Each poem has its own poignant individually, but there is also a powerful sense of architecture which runs through the collection.

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…

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’s 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?

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.

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, The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo by the American artist Tom Feelings.

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

Rich in literary reference and variety of setting, these love poems celebrate the word as well as the flesh.

This original and meditative text combines an intensive critical reading of ’You Are involved’, by the late Guyanese poet Martin Carter, and a series of ’poems of October’ written within the spaces of the essay.