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 ...

Dark and Unaccustomed Words  by Vahni Capildeo, 2011, Egg Box Publishing, 120pp OF POETRY, DH Lawrence once remarked, “The essential quality of poetry is that it makes a new effort of attention, and ‘discovers’ a new world within the known world.” What of the poetry of Trinidadian poet Vahni Capildeo, whose latest book is published next month?  “This poetry is not for the faint-hearted,” is how Edward Baugh opens a review of Capildeo’s  Undraining Sea . Of her first collection,  No Traveller Returns , the critic Robert Bond, in a review which is not for the faint-hearted, says, “Capildeo’s book attempts a language without intention, to replicate the obscure expression of objectless inwardness, which is sensed to intend toward utopia.” Adding to the cauldron is David Miller who argues that Capildeo’s poetry “is utterly divorced from that unfortunately prevalent tendency to write poems where the words give way to an applauding audience at the next prestigious poetry aw...

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...