A Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Adam Lowe's debut collection takes us on a journey rich in observation and always in a poetry that makes an art of patterflash.
This collection is a call to arms that opens out the struggle for human survival in the epoch of the Anthropocene to remind us that this began not just in the factories of Europe but in the holds of the slave ships and plantations of the Caribbean. No natural world was more changed than the West Indian islands by sugar monoculture - and as the title poem begins: "At the end of this sentence, a flood will rise/ and swallow low-lying islands of the Caribbean". Historically, "the debris of empire that crowd our shores" connects to the "sands of our beaches / littered with masks and plastic bottles." Philp's powerful and elegant poems that span past and present make it very clear that there cannot be a moral response to the climate crisis that is not also embedded in the struggle for social justice, for overcoming the malignancies of empire and colonialism and against the power of global capitalism -the missions of the West that had and have at their heart the ideology of white supremacy. These are poems of wit and anger, but also of personal intimacy - the vexed relationship with a violent father - and line after line of the shapeliest poetry - in sound, in rhythm and the exact choice of word.
The publication of Jonathan Cohen's translation of Poemas de buen amor... y a veces de fantasia, by the great national poet of the Dominican Republic, and an unquestionably major Caribbean poet, Pedro Mir, shows another side entirely of Mir's work: the sensual and erotic.
When the Trinidadian novelist, Harold Sonny Ladoo was found dead soon after the publication of his classic novel, No Pain Like This Body, for Christopher Laird, it became an obsession to try to discover the writer behind the work and what had brought about his untimely end. Equal to Mystery - words written by Ladoo - is the record of that pursuit.
"An unrivalled and often witty account of the Caribbean Voices and West African Voices programmes and the writing personalities involved in the crucial 1950s period." - DAVID DABYDEEN
As he enters his nineties, the poet's world has become, increasingly, his house and garden, his wife, children and grandchildren, a world experienced as no less rich than anything in the past - indeed ever more precious for its evanescence.
In this narrative rooted in soil and spread by whispers, Nii Ayikwei Parkes brings a metaphor of resource-rich countries to vivid life in prose peppered with nods to fairy tales, twentieth century music biographies, and politics headlines, asking the question: what is the price we pay to have a place to call home?
J. Vijay Maharaj invents the hidden life of Leila Ramsumair, the mostly silent wife of the Ganesh Ramsumair, the protagonist of V.S. Naipaul's satire on Trinidadian Hinduism, The Mystic Masseur.
This anthology creates a dichotomy between the comfortable and the mysterious, providing a glimpse into hidden worlds and human nature; tantalizing in its mystique and refreshing in its insight into the minds of these exceptional Black British writers. Published under the Inscribe imprint of Peepal Tree Press, and edited by Leone Ross.
The long-awaited debut of a seasoned poet that speaks to the splendid tensions and graces of an immigrant's imagination and language, rooted in her Trinidad birthplace, and her uneasy American home. Her poems range across three ways of seeing: the ode finding beauty in the unexpected; the mythologizing of daily life; and her lyric poems of healing.
This frank, fearless and multi-layered debut, set in India, Trinidad and Tobago, England, and St Lucia, centres on a privileged but dysfunctional family, with themes of empire, migration, race, and gender.
In this memoir, the celebrated novelist and retired teacher Barbara Jenkins writes with wit, vividness and insight of growing up in colonial Trinidad, a migrant life in Wales, and her return to Trinidad with her husband and first child in the post-independence era.
The effects of historical tensions, class and climate change are laid bare in little-known Bermuda, bringing the islands to vivid life in this rich and absorbing novel as five characters come together to keep a young Black girl from incarceration.
unHistory is an essential record of our times by two world-leading poets, it is much more than that. It is an exploration of history's undertones, its personal, familial and institutional resonances and of the relationship between public events and the literary imagination.
In musical, evocative language, her poems imagine the what-if-that-almost-was of Scotland's best-loved Bard, following Robert Burns into the life he might have lived as a plantation overseer in Jamaica-then seeing his enslaved granddaughter come back to Scotland to claim a life reserved for white women. Evie Shockley This collection is timely and timeless as it reframes the complicated genealogies created by colonialism. Erasure is one of the colonizer's most insidious tools and McCallum's gorgeous monologues serve to reclaim the voices ignored, unsaid, and unclaimed because of colonialism. Adrian Matejka A subtle, multi-layered verse narrative... The worlds it vividly presents beget reflections on creativity, history, slavery, race and many other issues. It is an exceptional work, a memorable achievement. Mervyn Morris Seemingly controlled words surge with echoes; poems keep double-entry accounts, striping the page, laddering like stockings. McCallum achieves an un-haunting. Characters are realer than real, less imaginary than re-storied. Like the returning dead, whom nothing 'will quench or unhunger', this work wants you, wants us, 'to begin again'. Vahni Capildeo
Glory Dead is a beautifully written account of the visit of a young English communist to Trinidad in 1938 to investigate social conditions and meet the radicals who were challenging British colonial government. This title is part of the Caribbean Modern Classics Series.
Jennifer Rahim explores the power of the imagination to confront the restrictions of the year of the pandemic through reflections on history and the capacity of language to give immediacy and presence to absent place. Rahim is a former winner of the Casa de las Americas Prize, and the OCM Prize for Caribbean Literature.
A beautiful new novel from the author of Crick Crack, Monkey, this is a Trinidadian story about island life and lives, that revisits and revisions the colonial world from a womanist perspective - tragic, comic, warm and wise, but always in struggle for better must come.
Based on true events, Fortune is a compelling and beautiful story of love, ambition, oil and fate set in 1920's Trinidad.
Green Unpleasant Land explores the repressed history of rural England's links to transatlantic enslavement and the East India Company. Combining essays, poems and stories, it details the colonial connections of country houses and public spaces.
Continuing on from his outstanding collection of literary criticism, My Strangled City and other essays, literary critic and Professor Gordon Rohlehr delves further, examining the many other luminaries of the Caribbean.
This beautiful collection of interviews, conducted by journalist, poet, novelist and artist Jacqueline Bishop, features insightful and entertaining conversations with many of Jamaica's most significant writers including Olive Senior, Lorna Goodison, Marcia Douglas and many more.
A wonderful collection of essays by inspiring Trinidadian poet and journalist, Andre Bagoo.
A stunning new collection from Nii Ayikwei Parkes, featuring poems that embrace play, love and the ephemeral such as water bodies, blood/heritage, history, and gossip.
Motherland and Other Stories is a collection of short stories from an exciting new voice that explores the experiences of Afro-Caribbean immigrants in America and England.
Writing both of imagined characters and as "I", Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw's stories deal with the experiences of loss, disappointment and the attempt to be self-truthful.
The Sea Needs No Ornament/ El mar no necesita ornamento is the first bilingual anthology of contemporary poetry by women writers of the English- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean and its Diasporas to be curated in more than two decades.
Prenumerera på vårt nyhetsbrev för att få fantastiska erbjudanden och inspiration för din nästa läsning.
Genom att registrera dig accepterar du vår personuppgiftspolicy.
