Lara Rains and Colonial Rites

Life on the volcanic island of Montserrat is the subject of these poems. They explore its vulnerability to the forces of nature - Hurricane Hugo and the erupting Soufriere, which even before its current devastations "opened a new bible/ in her pulpit in the hills/to teach us the arithmetic of days".
A sequence of obituary poems reminds that in a small society - a "two-be-three island/hard like rock" - people are the one true resource. The theme of the irreplaceability of individual lives takes on a special poignance as Montserrat's viability is threatened by the flight of its population.
A historian of Montserrat's continuous existence as a society since the seventeenth century, Howard Fergus writes with both love and anger about the frustrations of "this British corridor", still hemmed in by colonialism.
Beyond Montserrat, he looks for a place in the wider Caribbean, but finds the unity he seeks only in cricket (and crime). In cricket, he finds a major irony: that through a white-flannelled colonial rite, the West Indies finds its only true political framework and the means - explored in a celebration of Brian Lara's feats of 1994 - to overturn, symbolically at least, centuries of enslavement and colonialism.