Peepal tree press ltd gb (990 risultati)

Paperback. Condizione: New. 'Monique Roffey is a unique talent and most daring and versatile of writers' - Bernardine EvaristoMarch 1976: St Constance, a tiny Caribbean village on the island of Black Conch. A fisherman sings to himself, waiting for a catch - but attracts a sea-dweller he doesn't expect. A beautiful young woman cursed by jealous wives to live as a mermaid has been swimming the Caribbean Sea for centuries. And she is entranced by the fisherman and and his song. But her fascination is her undoing. She hears his boat's engine again, follows it, and finds herself at the mercy of American tourists. After a fearsome battle, she is pulled out of the sea and strung up on the dock as a trophy. The fisherman rescues her, and gently wins her trust - as she starts to transform into a woman.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. 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 and Other Queer Goings On is about Black diasporic love at its most radical and life-affirming.Dorothea Smartt is a literary activist, live artist, and established and respected poet with an international reputation. …

Paperback. Condizione: New. A talking frog, a haughty green cat, an animal fashion show: these are some of the characters and scenes which will delight the many children who enjoyed When Grandpa Cheddi was a Boy.Set mainly in Guyana, these stories of brave, ingenious, kindly and sometimes mischievous animals and children use humour and mystery to provide a strong framework of positive human values which children will instinctively appreciate and digest.Janet Jagan has served Guyana for over fifty years as a politician and as editor of the Mirror newspaper. She was the first woman President of Guyana.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. Hurricane is the gripping story of a natural disaster and the thirteen year-old Kingston boy who lives to tell the tale.Holed up in their home, Joe Brown, his sister Mary and their parents wait for the eye of the hurricane to pass over them. Outside, a terrifying wind turns trees to splinters, darkness swallows the land and torrential rains lash the roof.Inside it is warm, dry, a home. A family huddled together for survival. But the storm hasn't passed yet, and all Joe and his family can do is worry, and wait, and hope.Praise for the original 1960s edition:"Strongly recommended." The School LibrarianHurricane was awarded the German Children's Book Prize 1967.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. Hurricane is the gripping story of a natural disaster and the thirteen year-old Kingston boy who lives to tell the tale.Holed up in their home, Joe Brown, his sister Mary and their parents wait for the eye of the hurricane to pass over them. Outside, a terrifying wind turns trees to splinters, darkness swallows the land and torrential rains lash the roof.Inside it is warm, dry, a home. A family huddled together for survival. But the storm hasn't passed yet, and all Joe and his family can do is worry, and wait, and hope.Praise for the original 1960s edition:"Strongly recommended." The School LibrarianHurricane was awarded the German Children's Book Prize 1967.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. In a collection that encompasses both Siri and the trickster god Anansi, in his travels from West Africa via the Caribbean to Black working class communities in the Midlands and North East of England, Degna Stone demonstrates not only how well she tells stories, but also of her awareness of the difficulties of communication, where "You know what he's saying / but not what he's getting at", or where the injunction against lying doesn't count in every situation. But if human interactions are at the heart of her poems, she also writes with telling precision about both place and animal nature. Not since Ted Hughes has anyone written so totemically about the crow, ominous, but also emblematic of tenacity, boldness and a harsh kind of beauty. When the poet declares, "I want to be as black as the crows", it is much more than an embrace of blackness in resistance to prejudice. "It's a cliche of poetry that we often say that it transforms the ordinary; this pamphlet disproves this, showing us that the ordinary and everyday have always been transformational, and Degna's poems allow us to see that. These are poems written from the outskirts -- of cities, of love, of the body -- with a pure distillation of language where no word is wasted."Andrew McMillan.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. In a collection that encompasses both Siri and the trickster god Anansi, in his travels from West Africa via the Caribbean to Black working class communities in the Midlands and North East of England, Degna Stone demonstrates not only how well she tells stories, but also of her awareness of the difficulties of communication, where "You know what he's saying / but not what he's getting at", or where the injunction against lying doesn't count in every situation. But if human interactions are at the heart of her poems, she also writes with telling precision about both place and animal nature. Not since Ted Hughes has anyone written so totemically about the crow, ominous, but also emblematic of tenacity, boldness and a harsh kind of beauty. When the poet declares, "I want to be as black as the crows", it is much more than an embrace of blackness in resistance to prejudice. "It's a cliche of poetry that we often say that it transforms the ordinary; this pamphlet disproves this, showing us that the ordinary and everyday have always been transformational, and Degna's poems allow us to see that. These are poems written from the outskirts -- of cities, of love, of the body -- with a pure distillation of language where no word is wasted."Andrew McMillan.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. 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.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. 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.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. Seni Seneviratne's debut collection offers a poetic landscape that echoes themes of migration, family, love and loss and reflects her personal journey as a woman of Sri Lankan and English heritage.The poems cross oceans and centuries. In 'Cinnamon Roots' Seni Seneviratne travels from colonial Britain to Ceylon in the 15th century and back to Yorkshire in the 20th Century; in 'A Wider View' time collapses and carries her from a 21st century Leeds back to the flax mills of the 19th century; poems like 'Grandad's Insulin', based on childhood memories, place her in 1950's Yorkshire but echo links with her Sri Lankan heritage."Loss, love, memory, from Yorkshire to Sri Lanka and back, Seni Seneviratne's poems delve in and out of a complex history. These tender, moving poems weave a delicate web." Jackie KaySeni Seneviratne is a writer, singer, photographer and performer. She was born in Leeds, Yorkshire in 1951 to an English mother and Sri Lankan father. She has been writing poetry since her early teens and was first published in 1989.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. Slave Song is unquestionably one of the most important collections of Caribbean/Black British poetry to have been published in the last twenty years. On its first publication in 1984 it won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and established Dabydeen as a provocative and paradigm-shifting writer.At the heart of Slave Song are the voices of African slaves and Indian labourers expressing, in a Guyanese Creole that is as far removed from Standard English as it is possible to get, their songs of defiance, of a thwarted erotic energy. But surrounding this harsh and lyrical core of Creole expression is an elaborate critical apparatus of translations (which deliberately reveal the actual untranslatability of the Creole) and a parody of the kind of critical commentary that does no more than paraphrase or at best contextualise the original poem. It took some time for the displaced critics to recognise that this prosaic apparatus was as much part of the meaning of the whole as the poems themselves, that Dabydeen was engaged in a play of masks, an expression of his own duality and a critique of the relationship which is at the core of Caribbean writing: that between the articulate writer and the supposedly voiceless workers and peasants.This new edition has an afterword by David Dabydeen that briefly explores his response to these poems after more than twenty years.David Dabydeen was born in Guyana. He has published six acclaimed novels and three collections of poetry. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. Frances Marie Cokeis a poet who has contributed to "Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts and Letters" and the author of the poetry collection "The Balm of Lilies.".

Paperback. Condizione: New. Roger Robinson recently came to the attention of UK audiences in the Bloodaxe anthology Ten, hailed by Carol Ann Duffy as "a joyful and important moment in publishing".The Butterfly Hotel is his first full collection of poetry, a telling document of the immigrant experience, from the 1980s to the present day, and the realities of uprooted culture. Butterflies hold a symbolic importance throughout, fragile yet ideal, adapting to survive.Roger Robinson is a writer and performer who lives in London. His one-man shows are The Shadow Boxer, Letter from My Father's Brother and Prohibition, all of which premiered at the British Festival of Visual Theatre at Battersea Arts Centre. He has received writing commissions from Stratford Theatre Royal East, the National Trust, the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate. His poetry has appeared in the Flipped Eye pamphlets Suitcase (2005; ISBN 9780954224776) and Suckle (2009; ISBN 9781905233212), the latter winning the Peoples Book Prize, and in the Bloodaxe anthology Ten, edited by Bernardine Evaristo and Daljit Nagra (2010; ISBN 9781852248796).…

Paperback. Condizione: New. Filigree typically refers to the finer elements of craftwork, the parts that are subtle; our 'Filigree' anthology contains work that plays with the possibilities that the word suggests, work that is delicate, that responds to the idea of edging, to a comment on the marginalisation of the darker voice. Filigree includes work from established Black British poets residing inside and outside the UK; new and younger emerging voices of Black Britain and Black poets who have made it their home as well as a selection of the Inscribe poets who we have nurtured and continue to support. They have all responded in compelling ways to the concept of 'Filigree'. Tolu Agbelusi - Sui Anukka - Raymond Antrobus - Lynne E Blackwood - Siddhartha Bose (Sid) - Victoria Bulley - Michael Campbell - Nana-Essi Casely-Hayford - Maya Chowdhry - Rishi Dastidar - Tishani Doshi - Zena Edwards - Samatar Elmi - Christina Fonthes - Patricia Foster - Kat François - Nandita Ghose - Nikheel Gorolay - Keith Jarrett - Maggie Harris - Joshua Idehen - Sumia Jamaa - Pete Kalu - Fawzia Kane - Rachel Long - Adam Lowe - Nick Makoha - Roy Mcfarlane - Ronnie McGrath - Momtaza Mehri - Sai Murray - Selina Nwulu - Louisa Adjoa Parker - Aisha Phoenix - Barsa Ray - Akila Richards - Maureen Roberts - Roger Robinson - Selina Rodrigues - Seni Seneviratne - Ioney Smallhorne - Degna Stone - Hugh Stultz - Ruth Sutoyé - Keisha Thompson - Gemma Weekes.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. In 1970 and 1971, Wilson Harris published two short story collections that explored the myths, fables and fragments of history of the Amerindian peoples of Guyana and the Caribbean. These are brought together in the current volume.In the absence of reliable history, and in the face of the stereotypes attached to these people (such as stoicism or a propensity for laughter), Harris makes no attempt to write conventional fictional reconstructions of an ethnographic kind, but subjects the fragments of tribal lore to imaginative revision.His stories work towards the discovery of what is "original" in the sense of primordial in these narratives, in discovering such common patterns as the loss of innocence, the connections between sacrifice and transcendence, or even the shared identities of cannibal and Eucharistic consumption.…

Paperback. Condizione: New.

Paperback. Condizione: New. 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.Lauren K. Alleyne is a native of Trinidad and Tobago. Her writing has been awarded the 2003 Atlantic Monthly Student Poetry Prize, the Robert Chasen Graduate Poetry Prize at Cornell, and other awards, and her poems have been published in Black Arts Quarterly and The Caribbean Writer among other journals. She is co-editor of the anthology From the Heart of Brooklyn (Vivisphere, 9781587761423), and author of Dawn in the Kaatskills (Longshore Press, 9780000100757), a chapbook.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. Roger Robinson recently came to the attention of UK audiences in the Bloodaxe anthology Ten, hailed by Carol Ann Duffy as "a joyful and important moment in publishing".The Butterfly Hotel is his first full collection of poetry, a telling document of the immigrant experience, from the 1980s to the present day, and the realities of uprooted culture. Butterflies hold a symbolic importance throughout, fragile yet ideal, adapting to survive.Roger Robinson is a writer and performer who lives in London. His one-man shows are The Shadow Boxer, Letter from My Father's Brother and Prohibition, all of which premiered at the British Festival of Visual Theatre at Battersea Arts Centre. He has received writing commissions from Stratford Theatre Royal East, the National Trust, the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate. His poetry has appeared in the Flipped Eye pamphlets Suitcase (2005; ISBN 9780954224776) and Suckle (2009; ISBN 9781905233212), the latter winning the Peoples Book Prize, and in the Bloodaxe anthology Ten, edited by Bernardine Evaristo and Daljit Nagra (2010; ISBN 9781852248796).…

Paperback. Condizione: New. As a child, Nick Mahoka fled Idi Amin's Uganda, and the poems in this collection relate to the horrors of the civil war that ousted the brutal tyranny of Amin. In political terms the poems chart the impact of imperialism and neo-colonialism that lay behind those traumas in the life of the nation. In personal terms, the poems are framed between the contrary pulls of attachment and flight, exile and longing. At their heart is an unwavering curiosity about how people behave in extreme situations, and what this reveals about our common human capacities to indulge grandiose visions, betray them, dissemble, seek revenge and kill. There is no presumption of innocence. There may be flight, but there is no standing aside. The narrator can dream (but is it a dream?) of a "dead man/who has been stung by the invisible bee of my bullet".There is much darkness of reference in the collection, but also a hopeful search for truthfulness and trust as the only things that matter. The poems - as poems of grace, control and beauty of image - demonstrate the power of the best poetry to speak of difficult things in a way that enlightens, not merely horrifies. The care in the making and shaping of the poems bears witness to the evident fact that for Nick Makoha poetry became "This rock [.] a sanctuary from which I can repair the ruins".…

Paperback. Condizione: New. As a child, Nick Mahoka fled Idi Amin's Uganda, and the poems in this collection relate to the horrors of the civil war that ousted the brutal tyranny of Amin. In political terms the poems chart the impact of imperialism and neo-colonialism that lay behind those traumas in the life of the nation. In personal terms, the poems are framed between the contrary pulls of attachment and flight, exile and longing. At their heart is an unwavering curiosity about how people behave in extreme situations, and what this reveals about our common human capacities to indulge grandiose visions, betray them, dissemble, seek revenge and kill. There is no presumption of innocence. There may be flight, but there is no standing aside. The narrator can dream (but is it a dream?) of a "dead man/who has been stung by the invisible bee of my bullet".There is much darkness of reference in the collection, but also a hopeful search for truthfulness and trust as the only things that matter. The poems - as poems of grace, control and beauty of image - demonstrate the power of the best poetry to speak of difficult things in a way that enlightens, not merely horrifies. The care in the making and shaping of the poems bears witness to the evident fact that for Nick Makoha poetry became "This rock [.] a sanctuary from which I can repair the ruins".…

Paperback. Condizione: New. Filigree typically refers to the finer elements of craftwork, the parts that are subtle; our 'Filigree' anthology contains work that plays with the possibilities that the word suggests, work that is delicate, that responds to the idea of edging, to a comment on the marginalisation of the darker voice. Filigree includes work from established Black British poets residing inside and outside the UK; new and younger emerging voices of Black Britain and Black poets who have made it their home as well as a selection of the Inscribe poets who we have nurtured and continue to support. They have all responded in compelling ways to the concept of 'Filigree'. Tolu Agbelusi - Sui Anukka - Raymond Antrobus - Lynne E Blackwood - Siddhartha Bose (Sid) - Victoria Bulley - Michael Campbell - Nana-Essi Casely-Hayford - Maya Chowdhry - Rishi Dastidar - Tishani Doshi - Zena Edwards - Samatar Elmi - Christina Fonthes - Patricia Foster - Kat François - Nandita Ghose - Nikheel Gorolay - Keith Jarrett - Maggie Harris - Joshua Idehen - Sumia Jamaa - Pete Kalu - Fawzia Kane - Rachel Long - Adam Lowe - Nick Makoha - Roy Mcfarlane - Ronnie McGrath - Momtaza Mehri - Sai Murray - Selina Nwulu - Louisa Adjoa Parker - Aisha Phoenix - Barsa Ray - Akila Richards - Maureen Roberts - Roger Robinson - Selina Rodrigues - Seni Seneviratne - Ioney Smallhorne - Degna Stone - Hugh Stultz - Ruth Sutoyé - Keisha Thompson - Gemma Weekes.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. John Lestrade is attempting to come to terms with the suicide of his friend Stephen, and his guilt that he did nothing to prevent it. Escape to a room on the hill is an act of internal exile, an attempt to find the space to overcome the inauthentic, automaton quality of his life. But Lestrade's self-loathing despair poisons any hope of reconnecting with his friends. It is only when his friend Derek's abandoned girlfriend is killed in a car crash, and is then refused a proper burial by the Catholic church, that Lestrade is moved to action. In its energy and in its rejection of the colonial straight-jacket that locks in the middle-class intellectuals in the novel, there remains in A Room on the Hill some possibility of honest reflection and escape. Garth St. Omer was born in St Lucia in 1931. During the early 1950s St. Omer was part of a group of artists in St Lucia including Roderick and Derek Walcott. His first publication, the novella Syrop, appeared in 1964, followed by the Faber publications of A Room on the Hill (1968), Shades of Grey (1968), Nor Any Country (1969) and J-, Black Bam and the Masqueraders in 1972. In the 1970s he moved to the USA, where he completed a doctoral thesis at Princeton University in 1975. Until his retirement as Emeritus Professor, he taught at the University of Santa Barbara in California. In 2001 he was honoured with the Saint Lucia Medal of Merit for service in the Arts and Literature.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. An Absence of Ruins was originally published in 1967, a period of decolonising ferment in Jamaica. This important and much sought-after Caribbean classic is now lovingly restored to print, with an introduction by Jeremy Poynting.Patterson writes in the tradition of Dostoyevsky and Camus, creating a spiritual heir to the unnamed 'I' of Notes from the Underground or La Chute. Through the tangled love life of one Alexander Blackman, Patterson offers up a devastating critique of middle-class pretension, turning instead to the vibrant realities of the Jamaican working class. Full of sardonic humour and social commentary, the novel looks into the dark heart of social hierarchy, colonial education and the impact both have on the individual and the many."A very moving book about integrity preserved through an honest appraisal of its apparent loss."Robert Nye, The GuardianOrlando Patterson was born in Jamaica in 1940. He is the author of three novels: The Children of Sisyphus (1964, reprinted by Peepal Tree Press, 2011), An Absence of Ruins (1967), and Die the Long Day (1972). He received the National Book Award for Non-Fiction in 1991, and the Order of Distinction from the Government of Jamaica in 1999. He is now Professor of Sociology at Harvard University.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. Raman Mundair's second collection of poems sees her expanding her territory to create a new poetic geography. Her voice dances with her love for the language and life of the Shetland Islands through the anguish of war to the movement of people and the crossing of boundaries. She brings to all a combination of passion and compassion, sensitivity and sensuality.The collection encompasses poems written in the Shetland dialect, narratives of thwarted desire and a sequence of poems which explore the dynamics and historical by-ways of the waltz.Raman Mundair is a writer and artist. She was born in Ludhiana, India and came to live in the UK at the age of five. She is the author of two volumes of poetry, A Choreographer's Cartography and Lovers, Liars, Conjurers and Thieves.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. John Lestrade is attempting to come to terms with the suicide of his friend Stephen, and his guilt that he did nothing to prevent it. Escape to a room on the hill is an act of internal exile, an attempt to find the space to overcome the inauthentic, automaton quality of his life. But Lestrade's self-loathing despair poisons any hope of reconnecting with his friends. It is only when his friend Derek's abandoned girlfriend is killed in a car crash, and is then refused a proper burial by the Catholic church, that Lestrade is moved to action. In its energy and in its rejection of the colonial straight-jacket that locks in the middle-class intellectuals in the novel, there remains in A Room on the Hill some possibility of honest reflection and escape. Garth St. Omer was born in St Lucia in 1931. During the early 1950s St. Omer was part of a group of artists in St Lucia including Roderick and Derek Walcott. His first publication, the novella Syrop, appeared in 1964, followed by the Faber publications of A Room on the Hill (1968), Shades of Grey (1968), Nor Any Country (1969) and J-, Black Bam and the Masqueraders in 1972. In the 1970s he moved to the USA, where he completed a doctoral thesis at Princeton University in 1975. Until his retirement as Emeritus Professor, he taught at the University of Santa Barbara in California. In 2001 he was honoured with the Saint Lucia Medal of Merit for service in the Arts and Literature.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. Seni Seneviratne's debut collection offers a poetic landscape that echoes themes of migration, family, love and loss and reflects her personal journey as a woman of Sri Lankan and English heritage.The poems cross oceans and centuries. In 'Cinnamon Roots' Seni Seneviratne travels from colonial Britain to Ceylon in the 15th century and back to Yorkshire in the 20th Century; in 'A Wider View' time collapses and carries her from a 21st century Leeds back to the flax mills of the 19th century; poems like 'Grandad's Insulin', based on childhood memories, place her in 1950's Yorkshire but echo links with her Sri Lankan heritage."Loss, love, memory, from Yorkshire to Sri Lanka and back, Seni Seneviratne's poems delve in and out of a complex history. These tender, moving poems weave a delicate web." Jackie KaySeni Seneviratne is a writer, singer, photographer and performer. She was born in Leeds, Yorkshire in 1951 to an English mother and Sri Lankan father. She has been writing poetry since her early teens and was first published in 1989.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. Winner of a Casa de las Américas Prize 2010, one of Latin America's oldest and most prestigious literary awards.The jury said the collection "captures a sense of the complexities of historical, social and cultural aspects of contemporary Caribbean".Jennifer Rahim's poems move seamlessly between the inwardly confessional, an acute sensitivity to the distinctive subjectivities of an immediate circle of family, friends and neighbours, and a powerful sense of Trinidadian place and history. Few have written more movingly or perceptively of what can vex the relationship between daughters and mothers, or with such a mixture of compassion and baffled rage about a daughter's relationship to her father. If Sylvia Plath comes to mind, acknowledged in the poem 'Lady Lazarus in the Sun', the comparison does Rahim no disfavours; Rahim's voice and world is entirely her own. There is in her work a near perfect balance between the disciplined craft of the poems, and their capacity to deal with the most traumatic of experiences in a cool, reflective way. Equally, she has the capacity to make of the ordinary something special and memorable.Here is no self-indulgent misery memoir, not least in its compassion and involvement with other lives. The threat and reality of fragmentation - of psyche's, of lives, of a nation - is ever present, but the shape and order of the poems provide a saving frame of wholeness. Poem after poem offers phrases of a satisfying weight and appositeness, like the description of the killers of a boy as 'mere children,/ but twisted like neglected fields of cane'.Jennifer Rahim is Trinidadian. She also writes short fiction and criticism. She is currently Senior Lecturer at The Liberal Arts Department, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. Dorothea Smartt connects past and present, presence and absence in this rich new collection of poems. At its heart is a sequence of poems set in Lancaster that excavate the missing history of Samboo, an African slave brought from the Caribbean by a Lancaster sea-captain as a present for his wife. Samboo died within days of his arrival and is presumed buried at Sunderland Point. The sequence both imagines Samboo's mostly unrecorded experience and draws connections between present day Lancaster and the foundations of its 18th century prosperity in slave trading. Begun as a commission by Lancaster Litfest, the sequence is a deeply personal response to the bicentenary of the abolition of British slave trading. It is accompanied by photographs which place Samboo's tragedy in the Lancaster landscape.Surrounding this sequence are contemporary poems that, on one level, in the vitality of lives revealed, provide a counterpoint to the emptiness of Samboo's too soon curtailed life, but on another level echo a continuity of loss wrought by the fragmentation of African Caribbean families through continuing migrations and death.The need to imagine who Samboo might have been, to tell his missing story and see through the false identity that others imposed on him connects to a more personal, contemporary sense of obligation in Dorothea Smartt's work. This is the duty to record family history, to envision a wholeness out of the fragments and dissolve the differences that prejudice may interpose between private and public selves.Dorothea Smartt, born and raised in London, is of Barbadian heritage. Described as 'accessible and dynamic', her poetry appears in several journals and ground-breaking anthologies.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. "Connecting Medium links the past to the present, the Caribbean to England, mothers to fathers. Here are poems about identity and culture, generations and the future. A powerful sequence of poems about a black Medusa. Poems that link the material world to the spiritual one. Poems that recreate a sixties childhood in South London in vivid detail. Connecting Medium is full of energy and life. Hers is a bright, passionate voice."Jackie KayDorothea Smartt, born and raised in London, is of Barbadian heritage. Described as 'accessible and dynamic', her poetry appears in several journals and ground-breaking anthologies.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. At the core of this collection are poems that chart the attempt to come to terms with the life shattering loss of two relationships: father and husband. They explore with a great exactness the connections between inner feelings and the physical context for those feelings: the Jamaican landscape, and the promptings of external phenomena to memory. They 'sip the brine of loss: proof that I have lived'.Though in one sense Gwyneth Barber Wood writes against the grain of much recent Jamaican poetry by writing almost exclusively in standard English (the one occasion when she uses nation language is all the more powerful by contrast) and using traditional forms of verse, her poems are intensely Jamaican. Those poems that are set in England are almost wholly defined by Jamaican absences. A London silence becomes all the more empty as the memory of 'someone's bashment in the valley welled/ up in my head.' Elsewhere there is a careful attention to the quality of Jamaican light that subtly maps shifts of mood, as when the shadow of the dying day 'creases the backs of hills', where what has once been solid becomes fragile and subject to change.Gwyneth Barber Wood was born in Kingston, Jamaica. Her work has been regularly appearing in the literary section of the Jamaican Observer and in 2001 she was awarded a Fellowship by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. …