Shiv­a­nee Ram­lochan

It is a shame, al­most uni­ver­sal­ly ac­knowl­edged, that when it comes to po­et­ry col­lec­tions, the on­ly ones who read them are po­ets. Ian Di­ef­fen­thaller and An­son Gon­za­lez's new an­thol­o­gy, 100 Po­ems From T&T, pub­lished by Cane Ar­row Press in 2012, feels like a valiant, fresh at­tempt to bring po­et­ry down from the dusty back shelf, and re­pur­pose vers­es for the time that lies ahead.

Per­haps the most win­ning fea­ture of the an­thol­o­gy is its lack of rev­er­ence when it comes to or­der­ing. This isn't to say that the po­et­ic big shots (in­clud­ing Gon­za­lez him­self, as well as Derek Wal­cott, Harold Tele­maque, Er­ic Roach and oth­ers) aren't giv­en their due; they are. What's more in­ter­est­ing is that the col­lec­tion by­pass­es chronol­o­gy, flank­ing pieces from the last few years with those tint­ed by the sepia of decades.

Promis­ing young voic­es in verse-mak­ing (Danielle Boodoo-For­tun�, Muham­mad Muwak­il, An­dre Ba­goo) are com­min­gled with the po­ems of vet­er­ans and lit­er­ary leg­ends. In­ter­est­ing­ly, there are po­ems with­in these pages from writ­ers not pre­dom­i­nant­ly known for their po­et­ry: Earl Lovelace, for one, makes a sur­pris­ing but not un­wel­come con­tri­bu­tion.More than one theme unites the eclec­tic cat­a­logue: proof that in con­verg­ing rib­bons of thought, there are sev­er­al ways to iden­ti­fy T&T, in her land­scape, her peo­ple, her pol­i­tics and the beau­ty that tran­scends al­most all pet­ti­ness.

Folk­loric fig­ures are tout­ed with the re­spect and ter­ror they de­serve. In Lelawat­tee Manoo-Rah­ming's 2000 po­em, Wom­an­ish Tongue, the dread Soucouyant is de­scribed as "a woman who live by words she suck/by night from the ones/who suck her blood/by day." The third move­ment of Vah­ni Capildeo's 2010 piece, In­to Dark­ness/Plus Que Noir, the soucouyant al­so emerges, "her stored skin poi­soned by neigh­bours with stamped thighs/she puts on a skin that smelts her, woman of no re­turn." In the an­thol­o­gy's open­ing po­em, Wind, Wa­ter, Fire, Men, James Christo­pher Aboud chan­nels his fa­mil­iar mo­tif of the La­ga­hoo, in lines that re­veal that shape-shifter's el­e­men­tal mas­tery.

One of the dens­est, most com­plex­ly re­ward­ing sub­jects worth un­pack­ing in po­et­ry is, ar­guably, the ques­tion of how a place's in­hab­i­tants see them­selves. What are the mark­ers, the every­day (or es­o­teric) em­blems by which Trin­bag­o­ni­ans can chart their iden­ti­ties? Jagdip Maraj's 1966 po­em Fad­ed Beau­ty poignant­ly ex­am­ines the per­ils of the In­do-Caribbean in­den­ture­ship ex­pe­ri­ence. Maraj chron­i­cles a sense of cul­tur­al de­cay with bit­ter­ness, say­ing that the fad­ed beau­ty of a race now "breathes asth­mat­i­cal­ly/in im­pure forms about the coun­try/and in ve­nal brah­mins re­peat­ing/ the scrip­tures with strange in­ten­si­ty."

Er­ic Roach's Let­ter to Lam­ming in Eng­land, writ­ten in 1952, rais­es point­ed, re­flec­tive ques­tions to its sub­ject, re­triev­ing no cer­tain an­swers about the sig­nif­i­cance be­hind our ge­o­graph­i­cal place­ment. Even with a lack of clear ab­solutes, the in­ef­fa­ble strength of our ties to the land re­mains cer­tain. Roach's po­em sug­gests this in its clos­ing echoes:"O man, your roots are tapped in­to this soil,Your song is wa­ter wiz­ard from these rocks."

Un­even­ness is al­most a giv­en in an­tholo­gies. The work of so many, of sev­er­al prove­nances and sta­tions, can­not be ex­pect­ed to feel ei­ther de­fin­i­tive or uni­form­ly good. Yes, some of these po­ems are bet­ter than oth­ers. Some evince greater care in their crafts­man­ship; some, quite like­ly, could have been trad­ed in for dif­fer­ent pieces with­out much de­mur. Still, each of this cen­tu­ry of po­ems seeks, in ways both mi­nor and out­stand­ing, to graft hon­esty and in­tro­spec­tion on­to T&T life: re­veal­ing, in the process, that life in T&T is a com­plex, many-splen­doured en­ter­prise.