Art visual np2

It's my birthday and the first gift I got today was White Egrets, the latest collection of poems by Derek Walcott. I've placed it at the top of my pile of bedside books which I've been slowly working my way through for a good few years now. Here is the opening poem from White Egrets: 1. The chessmen are as rigid on their chessboard as those life-sized terra-cotta warriors whose vows to their emperor with bridle, shield and sword were sworn by a chorus that has lost its voice; no echo in that astonishing excavation. Each soldier gave an oath, each gave his word to die for his emperor, his clan, his nation, to become a chess piece, breathlessly erect in shade or crossing sunlight, without hours-- from clay to clay and odorlessly strict. If vows were visible they might see ours as changeless chessmen in the changing light on the lawn outside where bannered breakers toss and the palms gust with music that is time's above the chessmen's silence. Motion brings loss. A sab...

Novelist Monique Roffey ar Maracas Beach "I fantasise that Patrick Manning has read my book, even likes it. I also fantasise that he wants to have me shot. If he banned my book, I’d be very proud of myself"--novelist Monique Roffey, author of The White Woman on the Green Bicycle , a novel which features a fictional rendering of a well-known Trinidadian politician. The novel was this month shortlisted for the UK's Orange Prize for Fiction. READ full interview here .

WHO? I was born at the park Nursing Home, Port of Spain (now St Clair Medical centre) at about 4am on the 24th April 1965. Early memories of Trinidad include a jelly fish invasion at Toco and sitting on a bamboo pole covered in bubbles, not knowing they were jelly fish, ouch. I was sent to a girl’s convent boarding school in the UK at the age of thirteen and have spent my entire life, since then, travelling between the UK and Trinidad. Today, I live in London, where I mostly write and teach creative writing. I recently invited my editor out to Trinidad to launch my second novel, The White Woman on the Green Bicycle at The Reader’s Bookshop, in St James. On the way home from the airport, driving through Maraval, I saw her staring out the window at the hills. I’ve written a lot about the hills which you see everywhere in Port of Spain. …she said: “God, now I see at you mean.” I loved the way she was looking with such awe at Trinidad and she hadn’t even got out of the car. “I still stare ...