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A hopeful, music-infused poetry collection from Congolese poet Alain Mabanckou. These compelling poems by novelist and essayist Alain Mabanckou conjure nostalgia for an African childhood where the fauna, flora, sounds, and smells evoke snapshots of a life forever gone. Mabanckou's poetry is frank and forthright, urging his compatriots to no longer be held hostage by the civil wars and political upheavals that have ravaged their country and to embrace a new era of self-determination where the v...

Marjorie Agosin's intensely personal long poem "The Light of Desire" is both a secular and sacred meditation on love and its meanings in the land of Israel. Following the tradition of the "Song of Songs" and the secular poetry of Sepharad, the beloved in "The Light of Desire" is both physical and metaphorical. The lovers' bodies are the paths, the geography, leading not only from desire to sensual pleasure, but to memory and illumination. The light on the pink stones of Jerusalem, the sunlight o...

'... here in the shadow of the Connors Sardine FactoryShe spawns her progeny of air and dies.'The juxtaposition of images of the salmon's sordid entrapment on a Canadian factory farm, images of its spiritual fulfilment (or nullity) and the tensions between its instincts for freedom and return offer a concentrated motif for this remarkable collection. In making his own return of memory from Canada and South Carolina to a childhood and youth in 1970s Jamaica (in particular as a student of Jamaica...

Cristina Peri Rossi was born in Uruguay and is considered a leading light of the "Latin American Boom" generation. In 1972, after her work was banned under a repressive military regime, she left her country, moving to Spain. This collection of poems, written during her journey and the first period of her self-exile, was so personal that it remained unpublished for almost thirty years. It is accompanied here by two brilliant essays on exile, one by Peri Rossi and the other by translator Marilyn...

Delores Gauntlett's poems give a real sense of what it means to be a contemporary Jamaican in 'this hard country', a land 'spinning on the edge of nerves', where 'shocking news is the norm'. Mostly alluded to, this Jamaica of dread is directly approached in a number of poems: a brother held at gunpoint, where it is the mental wounds that sap , or in the careful euphemisms of describing the mother unable 'to rise from the day/of her son's affliction at the boot of authority'. Her collection also...

In "After-image", Dennis Scott displays in ever more refined, pared-down ways the qualities that, in his previous collections, established him as a major Caribbean poet. There is his acute intelligence, seriousness worn lightly, and meticulous craft with sound and the appearance of the poem on the page. There is his resolute integrity as a Black and Caribbean poet with a sense of multiple inheritances who refuses to be conscripted into any sentimental or monolithic stance, who goes 'among the fa...

"Impossible Flying" is Dawes' most personal and universal collection, 'telling family secrets to strangers'. There are moments of transcendence, but often there is 'no epiphany, just the dire cadence of regret' since the failures of the past cannot be undone, and there is no escape from human vulnerability, the disappointment of hopes, bodily decay and death. From that bleak acceptance comes a chastened consolation, and as for poems, 'they are fine and they always find a way to cope/they outlast...

Wayne Brown's On the Coast was first published in 1972. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in the UK and established Brown as one of the finest young poets of the post-Walcott generation. It was followed in 1988 by Voyages, a collection that amply showed the maturing of Brown's remarkable gifts but was rarely available. Now, long after some of the 'revolutionary' poets are forgotten, it is possible to see that Brown's work has been seminal in Caribbean poetry, both for its intrinsic qua...

There is a candour to Esther Phillips's affecting collection of poems, The Stone Gatherer, that can be quite disarming. In poems that undress the foibles of family – a father's masks and a mother's 'fortissimo' – there is tenderness and affection despite the pain. Here is a poet's voice that seeks and finds grace notes in the spaces between experience. Hers is a poetics that locates itself in the landscape of Barbados, displaying a facility for the Barbadian dialect and the lyrical West Indian E...

Velma Pollard is a writer, a researcher, and an educator from Jamaica. She is the author of several books, including" The Best Philosophers I Know Can't Read and Write," "Considering Woman I & II," "Crown Point and Other Poems," and "Shame Trees Don't Grow Here." She is also the recipient of the prestigious Casa de las Americas Prize for her novella "Karl."

Edward Baugh has one of the most recognisable voices in Caribbean poetry: his dry wit, poise and elegance, his constant capacity to surprise with the range of his concerns. Black Sand comprises poems selected from Baugh's two previous collections, A Tale from the Rain Forest (1988) and It was the Singing (2000), plus a collection's worth of new poems. His subject matter ranges wide: race, history, sport, love, the academic life, the consolations of natural beauty. He also casts a shrewd eye ove...

"I never thought I would come all this wayto come all this way."The troupe of "friends" and "strangers" whom the reader meets in these poems are sometimes alter egos, sometimes aliases, sometimes adversaries. Located in worlds such as those of French film noir, spy movies, and travellers' tales, they inhabit a milieu of mistaken identity, deliberate disguise and random encounters in hotels. For the voyager, "there are too many wrong countries" and "already no one remembers you at home." Despite...

Winner of the 2016 Governor General's Award and a NIFCA Gold! Leaving Atlantis is a suite of poems that explores the unstable territory between public and private. They are addressed to the great Barbadian novelist and thinker, George Lamming, the silent but speaking partner in a relationship of love that comes between two writers when “your flag is flying at half-mast”. Leaving Atlantis is a suite of poems that explores the unstable territory between public and private. They are addressed to t...

In Passport to Here and There Grace Nichols traces a journey that moves from the coastal memories of a Guyana childhood to life in Britain and her adoptive Sussex landscape. In these movingly redemptive and celebratory poems, she embraces connections and re-connections, with the ability to turn the ordinary into something vivid and memorable whether personal or public, contemporary or historical, most notably in a sonnet-sequence which grew out of a recent return trip to Guyana. Her ninth collec...

Martín Espada is a poet who "stirs in us an undeniable social consciousness," says Richard Blanco. Floaters offers exuberant odes and defiant elegies, songs of protest and songs of love from one of the essential voices in American poetry. Floaters takes its title from a term used by certain Border Patrol agents to describe migrants who drown trying to cross over. The title poem responds to the viral photograph of Óscar and Valeria, a Salvadoran father and daughter who drowned in the Río Grande,...