Kamau Brathwaite has discovered a rich new vein of inspiration late in life, writing poems of urgency, wisdom, pain and brave humour. No poet since Hardy and Yeats has written about old age so insightfully and with such deep feeling.
What you also hear in the poems, reaching back through Brathwaite’s distinctive Barbadian nation-voice, his creolisms of sound and graphic display, is a dialogue with ancestors of all kinds, including English poets such as Blake, Wordsworth and John Clare, as fellow visionary spirits who call through the ages with their sense of place, the loneliness of vision and the oneness of life.
Always the innovator of language, Kamau uses form, phrase and sound to full effect in this collection.