Reviews a book of verse comprising 58 poems and an epilogue in which the author draws heavily on his travels in Africa and the Caribbean for inspiration. The review provides a brief discussion of a few of the more noteworthy poems
Tillis explores the socio-political poetics of Blas Jiménez in the context of the negritude aesthetic in the Spanish-speaking world. The selected poems of Jiménez attest to the continuation of negritude ideology of Afrocentric thematic poetry in the Carribean and showed that the poet's social criticism is linked to an ideology of white supremacy resulting from colonialism and slavery.;
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.
The author examines race, language, and identity in Derek Walcott's poetry, reading Walcott's poetry as an extended meditation on the question of whether it is possible to exist within the English language and an Afro-Caribbean tradition, drawing poetic nourishment from each, or whether the attempt is a betrayal of both. Of mixed racial ancestry, a native speaker of French Creole who was formally educated in British colonial schools, raised Methodist on the Catholic island of St. Lucia, Derek Walcott occupies a peripheral place with respect to both English and Caribbean culture, it is noted. Throughout the course of his poetic career he has been criticized from both perspectives, either for "appropriating the Other" and putting it to use in the service of the dominant culture or for not assimilating that dominant (English) culture fully enough.;
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:
1 microfiche, Winston Farrell is a performing poet and theatre practioner from the island of Barbados. This work has been created out of a series of interactions with senior citizens focusing on their life experiences and their environment. Some of them are very performance-oriented and stand out as an exercise in storytelling.
223 p., Argues that certain iconic poems have shaped the canon of American poetry. Not merely "canonical" in the usual sense, iconic poems enjoy a special cultural sanction and influence; they have become discourses themselves, generating our notions about American poetry. By "iconic" the author means extraordinarily famous works like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride," Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," and Claude McKay's "If We Must Die," that do not merely reside in the national memory but that have determined each poet's reception and thus have shaped the history of American poetry.
