peepal tree press apr 2023 (2 Ergebnisse)

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - This is poetry written in the time of onrushing global disaster, of a racist and still imperial USA and of Black Lives Matter. Philp's powerful and elegant poems span past and present, with a call to arms that opens out the struggle for human survival in the epoch of the Anthropocene to remind us that these horrors began not just in the factories of Europe but in the holds of the slave ships and plantations of the Caribbean. No natural world was more changed than the West Indian islands by sugar monoculture - and, as the title poem begins: 'At the end of this sentence, a flood will rise/ and swallow low-lying islands of the Caribbean'. Historically, 'the debris of empire that crowd our shores' connects to the 'sands of our beaches / littered with masks and plastic bottles.' These are poems of wit and anger, but also of personal intimacy - dealing with the vexed relationship with a violent father - and give us line after line of the shapeliest poetry - in sound, in rhythm and the exact choice of word.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Henry Swanzy (1915-2004) has an unrivalled position as the midwife of Caribbean writing in the post 1950s period. As the editor of the BBC Caribbean Voices programme (initiated by Una Marson) between 1946 and 1956, he was there as the careers of George Lamming, Edgar Mittelholzer, Jan Carew, V.S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon and many others took off in London. As a programme aimed in the first place at a Caribbean listenership, Swanzy encouraged writing that was authentic to its Caribbean roots, in language, theme and social concern. As an Irishman, Swanzy retained enough of a post-colonial sensibility to be positively sympathetic to the nationalist thrust of the writing. He was evidently well-respected by the writers to whom he offered both literary and personal support - and not least for his awareness of their pecuniary needs. Once Caribbean Voices was well established, it was left in the hands of Caribbean editors (including Mittelholzer and V.S. Naipaul) and Swanzy himself went off to Ghana in 1956 to encourage and support writers and broadcasting there. Thanks to the generosity of Swanzy's heirs, his private and often amusingly indiscreet diaries of this period (known as 'Ichabod') have been made available and carefully edited and documented by the team of Niblett, Campbell and Smith. With an introduction that puts Swanzy and these radio programmes in context, this is both an essential, entertaining and highly readable book for anyone even remotely interested in the development of Caribbean writing. Not least of its value is the extensive appendix where Niblett et al. have documented all the writers mentioned in the diary. This, in itself, is a salutary reminder of the wealth of writing talent in both the Caribbean and Ghana that flowered in this period but then, in the absence of other opportunities, in many cases undeservedly disappeared from view.