The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry.

• Author: Martin, Jorge Hernandez

Aware that "the anthologist's power . . . is finally the power to exclude," Ian McDonald and Stewart Brown have outlined their criteria for the organization of this anthology. The editors of this interesting volume present sixty-one contemporary poets who express themselves in English or an English-inflected Creole. These poets write from the Caribbean, or direct their poetry to this region of the Hemisphere, and represent seven countries, led here by Jamaica, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago. Because of the editors' desire to show a cross section of current Caribbean poetry, without espousing any particular thesis or grouping the poems by subject, style, period, or region, Caribbean Poetry offers a kaleidoscopic view of what have come to be called the Peoples of the Sea.

This kaleidoscopic impression of the Caribbean as something incomplete and elusive, with a nature that is changing, unstable, heterogeneous, and colorful, if dark in tone, results from the editors' wide-ranging approach and is reflected in some of the poems. Thus Abdul Raman Slade Hopkinson writes:

Each verse excites the Caribbean pattern.

Cued by your grieving, five

Adopted tongues, five voices cross our sea:

They're scored together in one shuddering chord.

In an arresting metaphor the poet expresses a union in diversity, but likewise the ephemeral quality of that union. The lines also allude to the linguistic complexity of Caribbean-English, to which this book is limited, which coexists with Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Dutch. And to these of course must be added aboriginal languages and locally evolved idioms such as Papiamento from Curacao, Haitian Creole, and Surinamtongo.

The toponomy reflects some of the heterogeneity that marks the Caribbean present and extends back to its past. It is so perceived by the Guyanese A. J. Seymour in "Name Poem":

Cabacaburi and the Rupunumi

Reverence is guest in that soft hush of names.

Behind the indigenous names to which Seymour alludes, Philip Nanton captures the violence of the European conquest:

From the pre-ceramic Cibony

to the ceramics of Saladoid and Suazoid

we know them from their shards.

The memory of these origins lost to mercantilism and the civilizing mission becomes a rallying cry in the verses of Jan Carew:

Christobal Colon

Sea-horseman of the Apocalypse

was discovered by gentle Tainos

before oblivion shrouded them

in holocausts of hate.

The flora associated with the tropics also appears in several poems, referring...