Biographer Delia Jarrett-Macauley stumbled across Marson's name while doing research for another book. The book has been well-received throughout Britain. Copies have sold out during every one of Jarrett-Macauley's book-signings and scheduled talks. "I saw this clipping that said, `Una Marson, the well-known BBC producer is now on holiday in Jamaica.' And I said: `What! You mean we had a black woman producer at the BBC as early as 1945 and we don't know about it.' I decided her story must be known," she said. Marson joined the BBC in 1936 and made an immediate impact, rising rapidly through the ranks. In 1942 she became the West Indies producer and created the Caribbean Voices programme, which won exposure and respectability for Caribbean writers and poets.
Oonya Kempadoo has been praised for her debut novel, Buxton Spice, a coming-of-age story set in the Caribbean. The book is a breathtaking glimpse into the inner life of Lula, a lively, highly imaginative girlchild growing up in a racially mixed family in Guyana in the 1970s. Kempadoo's unique and vibrant prose is the camera lens on the lushly exotic world that Lula inhabits. Through her eyes readers are introduced to the colorful denizens of Tamarind Grove. We see the village prostitutes (Sugar Baby, Bullet and Rumshop), the eccentric families, the gentle town spinsters, and Aunt Ruthy, the obeah voodoo lady.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
342 p, First published in 1764, The Sugar Cane is a major work in the history of Anglophone Caribbean literature. It is the only poem written in the Caribbean before the twentieth century to achieve a place in the Western 'canon'. Grainger wrote a "West India Georgic", challenging assumptions about poetic diction and the proper subject matter of poetry, and boldly asserting the importance of the Caribbean to the eighteenth-century British empire. This is the first reliable text and critical study of the poem, setting it within the context of Grainger's life and work; Grainger interprets his own experience of the Caribbean through his wide reading of literature. This is a critical study of his poem "The Sugar-Cane." (Amazon)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
102 p., Psychic Unrest is full of the sea and rain, blues and golds, rhythm and revolution. This is Lillian Allen's long-anticipated book of poems her first book since 1993. Collected here is a mix of poems, songs and poetic essays. Allen creates and examines a new poetic style, blending traditional poetry with her inimitable lyrical style, resulting in abstract poems with rhythmic movement that shout out to be read aloud.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
495 p., Investigates the diverse poetic manifestations of a sensibility that may be designated as French Caribbean through a close reading of a representative sample of poems. Many are presented here in translation for the first time. Contents: Marie-Magdeleine Carbet -- Léon-Gontran Damas -- Aimé Césaire -- Edouard Glissant -- Guy Tirolien -- Yves Padoly -- Joseph Polius -- Gilette Bazile, Marcelle Archelon-Pépin, Michèle Bilavarn.
