by Shivanee Ramlochan, Paper Based Blogger

Peekash Press, 2015

Writers from T & T, Jamaica, Guyana, St. Lucia and St. Vincent take to the proscenium of this diverse yet united ampitheatre – that of recent, dazzling arrivals to the Caribbean verse community. Each poet receives a generous berth of allotted space from the Peekash editors, in showcasing the range and lyrical, linguistic complexity of their pieces. Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné, winner of the 2015 Hollick Arvon Prize, astounds with the unassuming, yet leviathan strength of her poems on intimacies, fear and feminist redemptions.

The concluding poem of her segment, “A Hammer to Love With”, summons dread recollections of a female subject’s fearful majesty, recounted through the eyes of a second person narrator – one who has been well-schooled in the wrathful, eclipsing instruction of such power:

“You remember, oh yes.
She must’ve been seventeen,
dragged him home bleeding from the mouth
and singing in god’s tongue.
Between her bone-sharp teeth,
the hammer, dark and glistening.”

Multiple Guyana Prize for Literature recipient, Ruel Johnson, demonstrates depths of paternal devotion, juxtaposed against carnal reflective heat. The final poem of his own section, “Sugar”, is prefaced with a line plucked from Walcott, but does not lean on that laureate’s strengths to craft his own historically replete word-diorama of life on and off the great, maligned Guyanese estates.

Sugar is as persistent in the memory as is blood and salt, Johnson reckons, as he uses clear, sonically sharp language to send these truths forth:

“in the hot, shimmering
sunshine of our summer
the blackened, grooved cutlass
drifting upwards to the sky, and
hovering for the space of some
fleeting, uncaught memory”

Six other poets bring their unique capacities for enchantment, persuasion and splendour to this anthology. Whether you come to these pages for Colin Robinson’s clear-eyed, trenchant thoughts on fragmented masculinities, or Sassy Ross’ fever-washed soundscapes of sensuality and faith, the worlds within these poems will keep you charted on a persistent series of returns.