Bøger af Kendel Hippolyte

Kendel Hippolyte's poetry moves easily, boldly between the worlds of public engagement and the intimacies of domesticity. What unites this movement are the distinctive sounds and rhythms of his voice, and whilst some poems have a named recipient, and some are addressed to himself, all engage the reader in an implicit dialogue. His is an art of sound, of the rhythms of the long, supple line, of form that sometimes disguises itself as no form, of the beauty of the crooked basket. He wants the poem to draw us in rather than hold us outside in admiration at its skill - and skill and craft are what his poems display in spades. His is a vision that extends outwards in illimitable ways in space and time, but where the scale is always the human body, the human mind. The challenge comes in the way his poems address the dread reality of a Caribbean world of disappointed dreams, of sovereignty swamped by the new economic and cultural imperialism that masquerades under the mask of globalisation, of waking "one morning and the Caribbean was gone", of continuing environmental degradation. The questioning comes from looking inwards to wonder why this has happened, what failures of vision, what empty sloganizing, what dishonesties, arrogance and failures of mutual respect led to the defeats so that "the rivers of Babylon clog into vomit..." The comfort comes from both the small loving kindnesses of the domestic - the rituals of coffee-brewing, of bed-making - but also the refusal to retreat, to look to the moment when flint and iron can "flare into the hot bright moment of a spark". This is Kendel Hippolyte's seventh collection of poetry. To the immense strengths found in his earlier work is added a new sense of urgency, of time running out. He is quite simply amongst the very best of Caribbean poets who warrant an international reputation.

The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry described Kendel Hippolyte as 'perhaps the outstanding Caribbean poet of his generation'. Until now his poetry has only been available in anthologies and slim collections which have been little seen outside St. Lucia. Birthright reveals him as a poet who combines acute intelligence and passion, a barbed wit and lyrical tenderness. He writes with satirical anger from the perspective of an island marginalised by the international money markets in a prophetic voice whose ancestry is Blake, Whitman and Lawrence, married to the contemporary influences of reggae, rastafarian word-play and a dread cosmology. He writes, too, with an acute control of formal structures, of sound, rhythm and rhyme - there are sonnets and even a villanelle - but like 'Bunny Wailer flailing Apollyon with a single song', his poetry has 'a deepdown spiritual chanting rising upfull-I'. Whilst acknowledging a debt of influence and admiration to his fellow St. Lucian, Derek Walcott, Kendel Hippolyte's poetry has a direct force which is in the best sense a corrective to Walcott's tendency to romanticise the St. Lucian landscape and people.

With verbal urgency and visionary imagination, this collection features the work of one of the Caribbean's most important poets. Presenting what life is like on a small island, vulnerable to the wounded thrashings of world capitalism in crisis--an island where livelihoods are destroyed at the flourish of a Brussel bureaucrat's pen; where Paradise is a tourist cruise ship that reminds the people of their neocolonial status; and where global consumerism has poisoned the ambitions of the young into drugs, crime, and violence--these candid poems are a warning of the perils fragmenting societies and ecologies.