BOOKSELLER INFORMATION

Publication Date: 01-Sep-04 | ISBN: 1876857498 | Trim Size: 216 x 140 mm | Extent: 132pp | Format: Paperback

UK Distribution:   | USA Distribution:   | Publishing Status: Active

SYNOPSIS

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.

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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

PRAISE FOR THIS BOOK

“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

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) de?ned 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.