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Sturge Town is a stunning collection of poems that connects with
the earliest days of Kwame Dawes’ work as a poet, from the roots
of childhood in Ghana to the reflections of a man turned sixty who
is witnessing his children occupying the space he once considered
his own. It ranges from poems that make something special of the
everyday, to poems of the most astonishing imaginative leaps. There
are poems that speak most movingly of moments of acute
self-reflection, family crises and losses through death, and there
are the inventive poems of the dramatist drawn to create the
stories of a rich variety of characters, many springing from the
observation of paintings. Metrically careful and sonorous, these
poems engage in a personal dialogue with the reader, serious,
confessional, alarmed and sometimes teasing. They create highly
visualised spaces, observed, remembered, imagined, the scenes of
both outward and inner journeys. Organised in five sections, Sturge
Town is a collection of finely shaped individual poems with the
architecture of a densely interconnected whole, with the soaring
grandeur and intimacy of a cathedral – both above and below
ground. As the site of the ruined ancestral home of the Dawes, in
one of the earliest post-slavery free villages in Jamaica, Sturge
Town is both an actual place, a place of myth and a metaphor of the
journeying that has taken Kwame Dawes from Ghana, through Jamaica,
through South Carolina and now to Nebraska. It parallels a
journeying through time, both personal, family and ancestral in
which a keen sense of mortality makes life all the more precious.
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Origins of the Syma Species
Tares Oburumu; Foreword by Kwame Dawes
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R466
R382
Discovery Miles 3 820
Save R84 (18%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Here is an opportunity to discover some of the best new,
unpublished poets from the Caribbean. With a generous sample from
each poet, there are new writers from Jamaica, Trinidad, St Lucia,
St Vincent and Guyana.Meet Danielle Boodoo-Fortune and her richly
gothic take on love and its complications; Danielle Jennings'
exuberant narratives of family history and the struggles for
respect between men and women; Ruel Johnson's often witty attempts
to confront the insanity of contemporary Guyana's race wars and
political corruption through the formal coolness of poetry; Monica
Minott's frank celebrations of women's sexuality and her attempt to
re-enter the world of spirit possession and trance; Debra
Providence's spare womanist reflections that pack a more
devastating punch by saying more with less; Shivanee Ramlochan's
confidently experimental poems that explore the threatening
uncertainties of the present through the imagery of speculative
fictions set in some post-disaster world; Colin Robinson's
polyphonic, modernist reflections on the queer Caribbean and its
joys and sorrows; and Sassy Ross's tightly structured explorations
of memory between the here and there of St Lucia and New York. Here
is a generation that has absorbed Walcott, Brathwaite, Carter and
Lorna Goodison, but has found its own distinctive voices, themes
and formal models.Each of the contributors is well on the way to
having their own first collections.Coming Up Hot is the second
publication of Peekash Press, a joint imprint of Akashic Books and
Peepal Tree Press committed to supporting the emergence of new
Caribbean writing, as part of CaribLit project.
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 spheresDawes contemplating race in the
crucible of police killings of black bodies in the US, and Kinsella
carrying the weight of contemplating and challenging the injustice
of the theft of indigenous land and country in Australia and the
terrible treatment of refugees and immigrants in that country.
These poems reflect the very different worlds that have shaped
these writers, and in the wonderful way that poetry can chart the
unpredictable journey towards friendship. They also reflect
commonalities: love of family, regret, cricket, art, politics,
music, and travel. Indeed, there is much in these poems that
provides us with a remarkable accounting of what can occupy and
frighten and delight two thinking and creative men who have devoted
a great deal of energy and time into making poems in the day to day
unfolding of our world. The pleasure that is seeded into the poems
is apparentin poem after poem one senses just how each is hungry
and anxious to hear from the other and to then treat the surprises
and revelations that arrive as triggers for his own
lyricintrospective, risky, complex and formally considered and
beautiful. The respect and admiration that these two poets have for
each other is apparent in the poemsin the echoes, in the ways in
which they stretch one another, and in the ease of languagea kind
of poetic honesty that comes from authority, assurance, and
curiosity. This was an accidental pairingan email exchange between
an editor and a poet that blossomed into a dare of sorts, and then
into a project that came under the brilliant scrutiny of two
prolific artists writing at the height of their poetic strength.
Speak from Here to There reminds us of the ways that poetry can
offer comfort and solace to the poet and how, at the same time, it
can supply the ignition for a peculiar creative frenzy that
enriches us all."
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.
"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
everything, cynical to the last foot.' The family secrets focus
primarily on the triangular relationship between the poet, his
father and younger brother, though in "For Mama" there is a
heartfelt and deeply moving acknowledgement of the rocklike
unconditionality of a mother's love and care for her family's
wounded souls. As ever with Dawes' collections, the rewards come
not only from the individual poems, but also from their careful
arrangement, internal conversations and from the overarching
meanings that emerge from the architecture of the four sections.
"Legend" begins the exploration of family mythology and the special
place of the youngest brother and the hubristic hopes invested in
him. "Estimated Prophet" gives context to the process of the
brother's descent into madness and their father's collapse into
despair and premature death in the condition of Jamaica in the
1980s when cold war politics and tribal wars brought an end to the
dreams of the socialistic 70s, 'that valiant, austere decade'. Here
the comic vision of the first section cannot be sustained in
writing about 'those chaotic seven years of dust'. This section
also deepens the counter-discourse of self-reflection on the act of
writing the poems: the confessions of impersonation ('I have stolen
much...') and the ambivalent space between history and myth in the
filtering of memory and constructed family narratives. The third
section, "Brother Love" is set in the present and deals with the
renewal of relationship with the brother and the guilty respite of
being away 'from the long lament', with marriage, children and 'the
peace and constancy/of new homes, while old homes seem/to crumble
about us.' The last section, "For My Little Brother" explores the
difficult dialogue between these two worlds, between a past that is
unalterable and a present that is shaped by it, but that contains
its own possibilities. "Impossible Flying" is deeply felt writing
that has an intensity and tautness which, if not new in Dawes'
work, rises to new levels of eloquence. It is impossible to read
this collection without feeling that one's consciousness of what it
means to be human has been immeasurably deepened, or without
wanting to constantly return to the poems.
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?
In this compilation, more than 50 contemporary Jamaican poets
reflect in outspoken, meditative, humorous, and outrageous ways
upon the historical and existential moment of Jamaican
independence. Ranging from the lyric and the pastoral to the
declarative and the celebratory, these poems employ language
registers across the full spectrum of Jamaican English and patois.
Often surprising and sometimes alarming, this book affirms the
contributors recognition of what it means to be Jamaican."
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.
Since the publication of her first collection, The Water Between
Us, Shara McCallum has steadily created a rich body of poems that
have mined the rich deposit of emotional and intellectual capital
found in her background of multiple migrations, culturally and
geographically. McCallum's poems reflect her rooting in a Jamaican
experience unique for her childhood in a Rastafarian home filled
with reckless idealism, the potential for profound emotional
pathology, and the grounding of old folks traditions. Her work has
explored what it means to emerge from such a space and enter a new
world of American landscapes and values. The Face of Water collects
some of Shara Mccallum's best poems, poems that establish her as a
poet of deft craft (and craftiness), whose sense of music is caught
in her mastery of syntax and her ear for the graceful line.
In this collection, the uncertain paths of childhood and adulthood
are traced through a sequence of poems that treat Idlewild--a place
deep in the heart of rural Jamaica--as a character, a constant that
serves as a reliable touchstone for memory. Although the majority
of the poems are centered on themes of security and pleasant
memory, the edges are haunted with truths of rupture in family
relations, abandonment, loneliness, resentment of unreliable men,
and the challenges of maintaining faith through difficult times.
Balancing nostalgia for the past with an acute awareness of the
present--the poverty, violence, class divides, and racial
complexities of modern day Jamaica--the central voice of the poem
matures along with the subject matter to gradually unveil a
well-formed poetic voice with an authoritative command of form and
language.
Hilda Raz has an ability "to tell something every day and make it
tough," says John Kinsella in his introduction. Letter from a Place
I've Never Been shows readers the evolution of a powerful poet who
is also one of the foremost literary editors in the country.
Bringing together all seven of her poetry collections, a long
out-of-print early chapbook, and her newest work, this collection
delights readers with its empathetic and incisive look at the inner
and outer lives we lead and the complexities that come with being
human. Showcasing the work of a great American voice, Letter from a
Place I've Never Been at last allows us to see the full scope and
range of Raz's work.
Frank and earnest, this moving collection of poetry offers a
glimpse into the support centers and hospice outside of Montego Bay
and the many lives that have been lost to HIV/AIDS in Jamaica.
Culled from open dialogue with sufferers and those who care for
them, and coupled with evocative photographs, AIDS becomes a
channel for universal dramas, archetypal voices, stoicism, despair,
and deeply human deceptions. Full of memories of a time when
diagnosis was equivalent to a death sentence, each piece brings the
lives of the indiscriminant victims to the forefront and battles
the notion that this can only happen to others.
The winning manuscript of the fourth annual Hollis Summers Poetry
Prize is also the exciting American debut by a poet who has already
established himself as an important international poetic voice.
"Midland," the seventh collection by Kwame Dawes, draws deeply on
the poet's travels and experiences in Africa, the Caribbean,
England, and the American South. Marked equally by a lushness of
imagery, an urgency of tone, and a muscular rhythm, "Midland," in
the words of the final judge, Eavan Boland, is "a powerful
testament of the complexity, pain, and enrichment of inheritance.
... It is a compelling meditation on what is given and taken away
in the acts of generation and influence. Of a father's example and
his oppression. There are different places throughout the book.
They come willfully in and out of the poems: Jamaica. London.
Africa. America. But all the places become one place in the central
theme and undersong here: which is displacement. ... The
achievement of this book is a beautifully crafted voice which
follows the painful and vivid theme of homelessness in and out of
the mysteries of loss and belonging."
"Midland" is the work of a keen and transcendent intellect, a
collection of poems that speaks to the landscape from inside, from
an emotional and experiential place of risk and commitment.
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Mummy Eaters (Paperback)
Sherry Shenoda; Foreword by Kwame Dawes
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R461
R377
Discovery Miles 3 770
Save R84 (18%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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2022 Longlist for the National Book Awards Winner of the Sillerman
First Book Prize for African Poets, Sherry Shenoda’s collection
Mummy Eaters follows in the footsteps of an imagined ancestor, one
of the daughters of the house of Akhenaten in the Eighteenth
Dynasty, Egypt. Shenoda forges an imagined path through her
ancestor’s mummification and journey to the afterlife. Parallel
to this exploration run the implications of colonialism on her
passage. The mythology of the ancient Egyptians was oriented toward
resurrection through the preservation of the human body in
mummification. Shenoda juxtaposes this reverence for the human body
as sacred matter and a pathway to eternal life with the sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century European fascination with ingesting
Egyptian human remains as medicine and using exhumed Egyptian
mummies as paper, paint, and fertilizer. Today Egyptian human
remains are displayed in museums. Much of Mummy Eaters is written
as a call and response, in the Coptic tradition, between the
imagined ancestor and the author as descendant.
Sparkling with sharp wit and off-kilter humor, this emotional
collection shows a distinctly contemporary and urban Jamaica
through the eyes of a surrealist whose sharp imagery and precise
language expose the absurdities and contradictions of society.
Written in a distinctly female voice that is modern and
experimental, these poems explore a wide range of subjects, from
the erotic to the ironic, with sophistication and imagination.
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Prophets (Paperback)
Kwame Dawes
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R310
R252
Discovery Miles 2 520
Save R58 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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In this insightful collection of poetry that brims with
self-deprecating honesty and sexual frankness, themes of
spirituality and gender relations are explored through topics such
as the death of friends and relatives, the anxiety of being a
foreigner in another country, the peril of unrequited love, the
importance of size in sexual play, and the premonition of tragedy.
With a deft handling of syntax, these thought-provoking epiphanies
on the human condition and haunted memories are full of earthy
sensuality and celebratory humor that are rooted in the everyday
details of living, loving, fearing, laughing, and hoping. Tanya
Shirley is an award-winning poet and educator. She lectures in the
department of literatures at the University of the West Indies as
well as a fellow of Cave Canem, a nonprofit organization dedicated
to the discovery and cultivation of new voices in African American
poetry. Her work has appeared in The Caribbean Writer, New
Caribbean Poetry: An Anthology, and Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal
of Criticism.
The first book ever to look in-depth at reggae as an artistic form,
"Natural Mysticism" shows how reggae combines politics, sex,
spirituality and art, and offers in depth analyzes of leading
reggae artists such as Burning Spear, Lee Scratch Perry and Bob
Marley.
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Exodus (Paperback)
‘Gbenga Adeoba; Foreword by Kwame Dawes
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R452
R366
Discovery Miles 3 660
Save R86 (19%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry,
‘Gbenga Adeoba’s collection Exodus focuses on forms of
migration due to the slave trade, war, natural disasters, and
economic opportunities.
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Using the sea as a source of language and metaphor, Adeoba explores
themes of memory, transition, and the intersections between the
historic and the imagined. With great tenderness and power his
poetry of empathy searches for meaning in sharply constructed
images, creating scenes of making and unmaking while he
investigates experiences of exile and displacement across time and
place.
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