January 2012
42 posts
“I don’t remember her ever smiling
as she took the order. The recipe,...”
– Mervyn Taylor, No Back Door
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“They say your dance is like a cure.”
– Kei Miller, There is an Anger that Moves
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The Sea Emptied
i. Ms Jack’s Daughter Leaves Us in Rage
In this crystal drain a fish grows
Until we abandon all things
Drain water of conversation
Clear softness of petals and weeds
As sure as that mossy drain:
She was enraged at broken terracotta men
Who picked plaster with scattered rain
A barren geography of drains
That the sea emptied
Now walls grow taller bodies
ii. Ms Jack’s House Grows Wild...
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Saturday
The sky in such good form. The feeling of the morning, and a kind of eternity, unfolding. Bright light on trees, cricket whites, Savannah benches. A quiet lunch, a restful siesta. Reading, reading, clouds. The idea that the night can happen, that tomorrow can happen, that things are to be done but may, in the end, be sublimely meaningless. I liked how the sky looked today and took this photo...
“He was touching the hard edge where life and art met”
– Peter Robinson, The Returning Sky
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“I used to pray for hurricanes”
– Kei Miller, There is an Anger that Moves
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“Is love time’s destroyer;
love’s essence, recognition?”
– Vahni Capildeo, Undraining Sea
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“But he is a hymn”
– Kei Miller, There is an Anger that Moves
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My book cover design
The design I did for the cover for my book of poems, Trick Vessels, to be published in March 2012 by Shearsman.
The book is about politics, transformation and art. It contains quite a lot of secrets.
For the cover I was aiming at something that could evoke several ideas at once. Are they flowers? Cells? Blood? Red and black has a significance all Trinidadians will recognise, forming two of the...
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WatchWeights
Directed by Willy Berliner Starring Nat Baldwin & Scarlett O’Hara
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“Thou art as tyrannous, so as thou art”
– Shakespeare
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“When you die I will peel the skin off
your cold bones and wear you
over my...”
– Tanya Shirley, She Who Sleeps With Bones
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“The black glove opens
and there it is, still falling”
– Mark Doty, Source
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“The earth is on the back
of an ageless iguana.”
– Christian Campbell, Running the Dusk
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More here.
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“What do we owe them, for
taking back what was ours?”
– Mervyn Taylor, No Back Door
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“If there was nothing, there was everything to be made.”
– Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Says
“Kisses are cherries out of season.
The weather wants to be alone.”
– Vahni Capildeo, Undraining Sea
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Can we translate the unknowable?
Like most people in Trinidad, I speak a little Spanish. I recently opened W.S. Merwin’s translations of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, and was struck by something I’ve wondered about for a while.
There is something inherently impossible about the act of translation. More so for translating poetry or works of literature. Consider the...
A year
In 2011, I turned 28, went to San Francisco and crossed the Golden Gate bridge twice, became terrified of flying, hiked in Muir Woods, sipped wine at Napa Valley as the air grew damp and cold around me, bought volumes on Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Doty & Passolini at the City Lights Bookshop (and read some Ginsberg and beat poetry there too), sat through approximately 602 hours of Parliament,...
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