Here is a book-length autobiographical poem in five parts, addressing the all-encompassing themes of the Caribbean experience: history, migration, myth, and domestic love.
Varying in style and tone throughout, Here is guided by a single narrator on an epic global journey, beginning in Trinidad’s plains of Caroni, and including an overnight bus trip across Europe, and a sojourn in Toronto, Canada. The sequence also features a moving account of a broken marriage, addressed to the narrator’s daughter, and ends with ‘The Last Avatar’, a mini-epic which re-casts the Caribbean in the mould of Hindu eschatological myth.
“Walter Raleigh once sat in a veranda in Trinidad dreaming of finding gold... If only he had Ramcharitar’s collection as his map.”
David Dabydeen, The Independent (on The Island Quintet)
Raymond Ramcharitar is a writer and cultural critic from Trinidad. A collection of poems, American Fall, was published by Peepal Tree in 2007. His short-story collection, The Island Quintet: Five Stories (Peepal Tree, 2009), was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book (Caribbean & Canada) in 2010.