Art visual np2

No Back Door  by Mervyn Taylor, 2010, Shearsman Books, pp. 90  Hew Locke, 'For those in peril on the sea'. Photo by Sam Millen. "SEA have no back door,” warns the father-figure in the titular poem of Trinidadian Mervyn Taylor’s latest book  No Back Door . The closing lines of the poem, with their complex comparative analysis of two lives and generations, are a haunting invocation of loss, memory and even bittersweet joy:      Sea have no back door, he said,      putting on his pyjamas and going      to bed. All night I could feel      the waves coming in. Taylor’s book, which was awarded the 2011 Paterson Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement, is a continuation of many of the themes of the poet’s earlier work (which includes  Gone Away  and  The Goat ). It is a potent examination of contemporary Trinidad life, of migration and of the spaces in between and beyond. Death, loss, aging and illness ...

Over drinks with a friend the other day the conversation turned to the following question: stranded on a deserted island for the rest of your life what books would you want to have with you?  Now being stranded on a deserted island might mean you'd be a little preoccupied with others things like fighting off the animals or hunting for food but you'd surely find time for some good literature!  1. The Bible  This one is a no-brainer. Most of Western literature, in some form or fashion, is traced to these texts which never fail to startle and inspire in every sense of the word. A must have. 2. The Tempest and/or The Complete Works of William Shakespeare .  The Tempes t is widely accepted as Shakespeare's last and--in the views of some--best and most atypical play. An elegy that is something of an homage to all that came before it from the Bard: Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that ...

White Egrets  by Derek Walcott, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pp. 86 Terracotta Army at Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, China.  Photo by Aiden MacRae Thompson. * * * The poem at the start of Derek Walcott’s  White Egrets  tells us much of what we need to know about the rest of the collection.  The scene could be anywhere in the world, possibly on the coast of a Caribbean island. A game of chess appears to be ongoing. Who is playing? How long have they been playing? This is not clear. But the chessmen, in the view of the poet, resemble another place and another time as equally unfixable and mutable: the “astonishing excavation” discovered at  Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, China, in 1974. The now famous Terracotta Army, reportedly dating back to 210BC, perform a kind of imaginative time-travelling that is a metaphor for the art of the poet as well as representative of the fact that, in the end, we must all leave things behind:  The chessmen are as rigid on their c...

A Nobel laureate, a MacArthur "genius" fellow and a first-time author are all shortlisted for the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the winner of which is to be announced during the first ever Bocas Literary Festival to be held in Trinidad this April. Here are the first lines from the three books shortlisted from Edwidge Danticat, Nobel laureate Derek Walcott and first-time author Tiphanie Yanique: * * * >>>EDWIDGE DANTICAT : Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (Princeton University Press, 208 pp.) On November 12, 1964, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a huge crowd gathered to witness an execution. The president of Haiti at that time was the dictator Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, who was seven years into what would be a fifteen-year term. On the day of the execution, he decreed that government offices be closed so that hundreds of state employees could be in the crowd. Schools were shut down and principals ordered to bring their students. Hundreds...

FROM THE ORGANISERS: Ten writers representing six different countries are in the running for the mewly-established 2011 Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. The prize longlist, announced by the judges on 28 February, 2011, includes three books of poetry, four of fiction, and three of non-fiction. The writers range from Nobel laureates to debut authors. In the poetry category, the three contenders are all extended meditations on themes of memory, loss, and hope. Kamau Brathwaite’s elegiac and typographically complex Elegguas joins Kei Miller’s uplifting collection A Light Song of Light and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott’s White Egrets , which muses over age and mortality. Three novels and a book of short fiction vie in the fiction category. Myriam Chancy’s The Loneliness of Angels , steeped in Haitian history, charts human connections across gulfs of time and space. Karen Lord’s Redemption in Indigo , inspired by a Senegalese folktale, plays with the conventions of traditional storytel...

I'm a slow reader and am way behind in my reading. But here is a sneak peek at what's at my bedside these days: *   Crick Crack by Merle Hodge and Summer Lightning by Olive Senior. Two Caribbean classics which everybody should read. I recently finished a writing workshop moderated by Hodge, who is a brilliant writer and academic and is also a social activist. The workshop, held under the auspices of the Cropper Foundation, gave unforgettable insight into the thinking and processes of writers like Hodge. I went back to Crick Crack after the workshop, having learnt a lot about writing and checked it out with a fresh perspective. From the start is it is a novel of understated power and I am looking forward to finishing it. The first story of the short-story collection Summer Lightning is its title story. A brilliant piece of writing with a wry, wise but dangerous tone. You have the sense that great literature is unfolding before you, like a chill wind that will not relent. Rea...

Novelist Andrea Levy The latest issue of Caribbean Beat features an interview with British/Jamaican author Andrea Levy on her Booker Prize-longlisted The Long Song : "With Small Island , I was looking at my parent's generation and their immigration to Britain. And then I wanted to go further into this relationship between Britain and the Caribbean, and of course you come into slavery, and I didn't want to write a book on slavery, because I felt it would be a very difficult thing to do personally, and it's a difficult subject to write about. "But then, I was at a conference on the legacy of slavery, where a young black woman got up and asked how could she be proud of her ancestry when her family had been slaves. She seemed to be ashamed of this, and I thought what a great shame that was, and I wanted then to tell her a story that would change her mind. So it made me want to tell that story, as opposed to being quite nervous about it." According to the piece...

Trinidadian writer, journalist and critic Raymond Ramcharitar's first work of fiction The Island Quintet  has been nominated for a Commonwealth Writer's Prize. The book, a series of narratives published by Peepal Tree Press in Leeds, United Kingdom, last year, has been shortlisted in the category of best first book by a writer from Canada or the Caribbean. You can see some of the other books nominated at the Commonwealth website here . The book has been largely well received, with academic and critic David Dabydeen describing it thus in a review for the UK's Independent  newspaper: The remarkable quality of this book is how closely observed character and landscape are, a precision which pays homage to both Naipaul and Walcott. The prose simmers, then erupts into outrageously satirical commentary on island life, the calms down again, Ramcharitar displaying a superb control of narrative flow. For those of you who missed The Island Quintet, here is its opening sentence: Trying...

The novel's cover is a detail from 'Grand Rivere' (2001-2002) by Trinidad-based British artist Peter Doig.  "There were no answers. I had nothing. There was only heat and the bright light that made that kind of heat. There was no shade, nowhere to rest, nowhere that the sun was not. You follow your life, you don't lead your life. I could sing with pain. Sing so high, high, high. Would my mother hear my singing? Once I had nothing. Now I had less than nothing. My whole life. My whole life I wanted to know my father. I wanted him more than anybody. More that Dr Emmanuel Rodiguez. I shall never know happiness. The light was on the other side of the world, in Southhampton, England. All my life I stepped towards it, little steps. I was halfway there and then I sank. The light pulled me from my darkness. I remembered the light when everything was bad. And now you put out the light. Just like that. I had less than nothing. It couldn't be like this. It couldn't be ...