Praise poems, p. 10:
...A number of McDonald's poems, early and late, follow a similar pattern. They centre on vivid figures who invite compassion or admiration: a rumshop girl, a mystic at a nightclub, stick-fighters, a cane-cutter, seine-pullers, a charcoal seller. a drunk, a murderer who rescues people from drowning, an English explorer in Guyana, the Main Street madman, a scholar-priest who once "meant to write," a decaying lover-boy, and so on.
Family matters, p. 12: Melissa Richards reviews Pynter Bender, by Jacob Ross. Pynter Bender was shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers' Prize in February of this year:
The title character of Jacob Ross's first novel is born blind, a full two days after his twin brother. He has the eyes of a white man and is viewed with suspicion both by his family and by Old Hope, the community of plantation labourers in which the novel is set. He is a jumbie boy, "one of de Old Ones come again." Specifically, he is believed to be the reincarnation of Zed Bender, a rebellious slave who died at the hands of his master.
In brief, p. 19:Geoffrey Philp reviews Daddy Sharpe, by Fred W. Kennedy:
Daddy Sharpe, the debut historical novel by Fred W. Kennedy, is a well-researched fictional narrative that recreates the life of the Jamaican National Hero Samuel Sharpe, whose leadership in the "Christmas Rebellion" of 1831 gave impetus to the passing of the Abolition Act in 1832 and eventually led to the end of slavery in the British Empire.
Prosimetrum, p. 30:Fred D'Aguiar contemplates the elasticity of time and space in the fiction of Wilson Harris.
...Traditional biographical data about Harris tell us he was born in New Amsterdam in 1921, trained in Georgetown as a surveyor, and from the late 1930s took part in, then led, expeditions into the interior of Guyana, to survey rivers and the areas around them . . . What he discovered on these trips forced him to search for a method to match his encounters with sudden rainfall juxtaposed with blinding sunshine, river depths of such marked difference in such close proximity that he doubted his instruments, local Amerindian tribes who historicised the place in purely mythical terms, and ultimately, a landscape imbued with qualities of a powerful character and God or gods, able to mould perception and resist categorisation.
[To read the full length of these and other reviews and analyses of Caribbean books, support the CRB by subscribing online at www.caribbeanreviewofbooks.com ]
Comments