This poem, which is part of Lorna Goodison’s collection I Am Becoming My Mother, is representative both of the poet’s particular focus on the experience of women and their strength and of her interest in Caribbean history and the heritage… Read More ›
David Dabydeen wrote the 14 poems that Slave Song comprises while an undergraduate at Cambridge University. The set of poems won Cambridge University’s Quiller-Couch Prize and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1978. Several individual poems were published before their collective… Read More ›
An early poem, Segregation represents Peruvian Carlos Germán Belli’s role as a nexus among the Latin American avant-gardes, the poetry of social concerns, and his own later, formally complex neoclassical verse. Belli uses short arte menor verses (fewer than eight… Read More ›
This quest poem fuses Derek Walcott’s highly metaphoric style with distinctly Caribbean Creole speech patterns. The narrator, a poet/sailor named Shabine, speaks English Creole, declaring, “Well, when I write / this poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt.” This… Read More ›
Omeros is Derek Walcott’s longest and most ambitious poem, evoking the tradition of epic poetry through its stylistic features. The title is a variation on the modern Greek pronunciation of “Homer.” Various characters have Homeric names: Helen, Achille, and Hector…. Read More ›
This is the first of Lorna Goodison’s poems on her relation with poetry, and it is also the first of her second collection, I Am Becoming My Mother (London: New Beacon Books, 1986). The contradiction between the poem’s title and… Read More ›
The slim surrealistic volume of prose poetry ¿Águila o sol? (1951) takes its title from a Mexican coin with an eagle and the sun on opposing sides. The phrase, equivalent to the English “heads or tails,” underscores a characteristic theme… Read More ›
Michelle Cliff’s first book, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise, is a collection of what can best be described as “proems” in both the intuitive and the official meanings of the word. The pieces combine prose and poetry… Read More ›
One of Cuban writer Nancy Morejón’s most anthologized and best-known works is Mujer Negra. According to the author, this compelling poem came to her in a dream of a woman appearing at her bedroom window. The next morning, Morejón recorded… Read More ›
Kamau Brathwaite’s poetic trilogy, The Arrivants (1988), consists of three previously published long poems: Rights of Passage (1967), Islands (1968), and Masks (1969), each comprised of many constituent parts. Critic Pamela Mordecai labels the trilogy’s structural elements in descending order… Read More ›
Kamau Brathwaite’s poetic trilogy Ancestors (2001) consists of three poems: Mother Poem (1977), Sun Poem (1982), and X/Self (1987). Brathwaite began Mother Poem while back in Barbados for the first time in almost 20 years. He recounts the realization that… Read More ›
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