Kamau Brathwaite

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Biographical note:  Kamau Brathwaite was born in Barbados in 1930. He graduated from Cambridge University with a B.A. in history in the early ’50s, and received his Ph.D from the University of Sussex in 1968. He lived and worked in Ghana from 1955 to 1962. The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973), the second trilogy, Mother Poem, Sun Poem (1982) and X/Self (1987) defined Brathwaite’s international reputation. He has taught at the University of the West Indies and is currently lecturing at New York University. He lives New York and in CowPastor, Barbados.

Biographical note:  Stewart Brown is Reader in African and Caribbean Literatures in the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham. He taught in Jamaica for several years, at Bayero University in Nigeria, and briefly at the UWI in Barbados. He has edited major anthologies of contemporary African and Caribbean writing and published books and essays on aspects of contemporary West African and West Indian poetry, including studies of the poets Derek Walcott, Martin Carter and Kamau Brathwaite.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857493
ISBN-10:  1876857498
ISBN-13:  9781876857493
Author:  Kamau Brathwaite
Title:  Words Need Love Too
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Sep-04
Extent:  132pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  8 mm
Weight:  198 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  Rest of world
Not for sale:  US

Main description:  Words Need Love Too represents both a summation — a drawing together of concerns that the poet has explored in his writings through the previous ‘years of salt’ — and a turning point, a hopeful new beginning. With hindsight we can already see the shadow of events like “nine eleven” — which happened when Brathwaite was in New York, living only blocks away from the World Trade Centre — that inevitably drives the poet and his writing back into explorations of the dread spectrum.

But for the optimistic epithalamium moment of ‘Words Need Love Too’ the visionary celebration of poems like ‘Agoue’ again seems both possible and important to this poet whose early work had been as much about celebrating connection and the possibilities inherent in the Caribbean’s rediscovery of its African heritage as it had been concerned to chronicle the barbarities and hurts of the process of cultural alienation that made such a rediscovery necessary. In terms of the prevailing tone of Brathwaite’s later writing that optimistic moment may be short lived but Words Need Love Too serves as an important reminder of the emotional and spiritual range of this great Caribbean poet’s work.

Table of contents:
PART ONE
JerryWard & the fragmented spaceship dreamstorie
PART TWO
Alice in Wonderland
Poem for Esse
Papak
Vulture
Boy at the Blind School
Blanche
Dread
Bread
Défilée
Words Need love Too
PART THREE
Yao
Requiem
The Zoo
Llannnmmmmmmwè
Bird Rising
Descending Gardens
The SilverSands Poem
Esplanade Poem
Bamako Poem
Viridian
Praise Poem
Namsetoura
Xângo ot the Summer Solstice
PART FOUR
Agoue

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Excerpt from book:  

Vulture

She’s black but prefers to be brown
it’s as simple as that

just like you

turning old wd prefer to be young
her eyes are dark but he dreams them blue

lovers love golden curls he believes
rather like you

And why is my voice so husky she grieves
I would rather trill like a bird. true-

pitch. slanting the heavens. than mourning
in leaves the passing and pain of this soft passive

love. What new
worlds to conquer. Columbus not down-

hearted Caliban is who she is after
rather like you

Review quote:  Taking place in Bathwaite’s post-“Time of Salt” flowering (between 1986 and 1990, his wife died, a hurrican destroyed his house in Kingston, and he was left for dead by burglars in his apartment). Brathwaite has been consistently aggressive in his poetics, and this book represents an iteration of his “Namestoura/Sycorax Video/tidalectics” style, which aspires to perform a cultural rehabilitation of the European and West African seeds in the Caribbean.

D.H. Tracy
Poetry