Caribbean Beat — July/August 2017 (#146)

Bookshelf
River Dancer, by Ian McDonald (Hansib Publications, 112 pp, ISBN 9781910553268)
“I have the feeling jaguars are nearby,”
declares one of the poems in River
Dancer. The line is powerful not because
it is delivered on the edge of a narrative
cutlass, but with the watchful quiet of
decades of observing life move, both slow
and teeming. Claiming Antigua, Trinidad,
and Guyana in his Caribbean passport, Ian
McDonald’s poems show the long span of
a life braided into others — a beloved,
beautiful wife steadfast in her attentions;
a host of fast friends, now either deceased
or demented; “boys in a football game /
boisterous and golden in the setting sun.”
Expect no abstruse flourishes in the
verse, no ornate literary calisthenics
to showcase proof of talent. The work
proves itself, steadily and with careful,
clean-polished imageries held up to
reflect the self-lit brightness of thousands of night orchids
at the edge of the Essequibo. In every visual dispatch,
McDonald takes the reader by the hand, firm but gentle,
and leads her through eighty years of
journeys: some indistinct, yellowing with
the sweet efflorescence of age, some
as vivid as if the poet’s youth were still
firmly clutched in his grasp.
It is the lodestone of gratitude that
eases these poems into the minds of
those who read them. In this way, the
poems become as friends, neither dead
nor demented: alive and present, listening
to the heartbeats of hummingbirds;
awaiting a new book of Walcott’s in the
post; ascending El Tucuche amid “huge
crapauds hopping in the muddy pools
/ wild orchids leaping in the branches
/ a rotten stump of tree pouring out
/ red bajack ants in angry hunting
streams / everything seemed good and
memorable.”
The goodness of that memory is the inner illumination
of River Dancer, a book deeply concerned with what lies
beyond the next turn in the oxbow lake.
Cannibal, by Safiya Sinclair (University of
Nebraska Press, 126 pp, ISBN 9780803290631)
These poems announce
themselves in cauldrons,
coastlines, and calamities.
Winner of the 2017 OCM
Bocas Poetry Prize and
the 2017 Addison Metcalf
Award from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters,
Cannibal comes not
with faint praise, but on
rapturous report — and
with galvanising reason.
Taking the maligned colonial
subject of Caliban,
Sinclair pirouettes his possibilities
in our literary vaults, affording him his own
language, and the power to curse, cavort, and carry on in
it. The narrator of “Home” reflects the restless certainty
of voyage contained at the core of Cannibal: “I’d open
my ear for sugar cane / and long stalks of gungo peas /
to climb in. I’d swim the sea / still lapsing in a soldered
frame, / the sea that again and again / calls out my
name.” When these poems arrive on your doorstep, be
unsurprised if they claim the blood of a glorious and
certain homecoming.
Curfew Chronicles, by Jennifer Rahim (Peepal
Tree Press, 208 pp, ISBN 9781845233624)
In an ideal world, a state
of emergency might bring
the armistice it intends.
In Trinidad and Tobago
in 2011, the official state
of emergency that lasted
four months uncovered
more crises than comforts.
Jennifer Rahim’s Curfew
Chronicles draws together
politicians in low places
with streetwise scholars,
bringing accounts of the
extraordinary and the
everyday together in prose
that presents us to ourselves: as incandescent, dramatic
residents of the 868. This novel in episodic chapters
reveals that the nation’s metaphoric state of emergency
didn’t begin in 2011; its roots remain sunk in something
far more insidious: “The real disease, brother, is when a
people lose sight of who they are. They think is a race,
a faith, a flag, a surname, a title, a bank account, a law,
even a hurt that make them who they are. A person, even
a people, could fall into that trap.”
34 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM