February 2012
44 posts
4 tags
“That wasn’t love: that was
you unravelling quietly”
– Tanya Shirley, She Who Sleeps With Bones
“The problem with island people is they from I-land. Is only I they unstan, not...”
– Rahul Bhattacharya, The Sly Company of People Who Care, reviewed at the Caribbean Review of Books.
3 tags
“Nothing ever comes true.”
– Benjamin Paloff, The Politics
4 tags
2 tags
“The banished bird spins no horizon.
Yet my eye webs the word.”
– W.S. Graham, The Seven Journeys
8 tags
My first copy of 'Trick Vessels'
There is something surreal about this.
I held an advanced copy of Trick Vessels, my new book of poems, in my hands for the first time. How strange to hold it! It felt like a fragile miracle. The pages breathed and sang, they blushed as I blushed looking at their fancy text; looking at the words and lines arranged on the page. How amazing to have your work come to life in this way. How...
4 tags
“Small as you are,
small husband,
is there room in your breast for me”
– Nicholas Laughlin, from Small Husband
9 tags
About words
“Another thing to remember about words in poems is that they don’t only mean what the dictionary says they mean (denote). They also conjure up in your mind other words and associations, feelings and scraps of memory (particularly of other places and poems where you have encountered the same word in the past), ideas and experiences. This property of words in a poem is known as their...
4 tags
“In a Blanchisseuse night in April
The sky will open, eventually.”
– James Christopher Aboud, Lagahoo Poems
2 tags
3 tags
4 tags
“If only this amber
at heart were enough.”
– Christian Campbell, Running the Dusk
3 tags
“I am your double agent.
I am my own false hope.”
– Nicholas Laughlin, from The Strange Years of My Life
4 tags
“Hurricanes expose these empty shelves in our lives”
– Olive Senior, Shell
4 tags
“A man strums his guitar so hard it bleeds.
Washed in blood we sway like cane.”
– Tanya Shirley, She Who Sleeps With Bones
3 tags
“Equal, always equal, to the inexpressible
at the very source of what I am.”
– Passolini, Roman Poems
1 tag
9 tags
“I suppose one could say that I live in words, that words matter. But the point...”
– Poet and scholar Edward Baugh interviewed by Jean Antoine-Dunn at The Spaces Between Words.
4 tags
“I never born.
I walk out the water one day.”
– Christian Campbell, Running the Dusk
4 tags
“Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human...”
– E. E. Cummings, A Poet’s Advice
3 tags
“Words want to reach the place where words are not necessary”
– Edward Baugh
4 tags
“This animal bursts the house open one day and finds another.”
– Vahni Capildeo, Undraining Sea
5 tags
“Danger knows full well
That Caesar is more dangerous than he”
– Shakespeare, Julius Ceasar
4 tags
“And lovers spoke in whispers,
Soothing the island to sleep.”
– James Christopher Aboud, Lagahoo Poems
5 tags
'Gorgeous, disturbing words'
I just got this incredible blurb from the poet Vahni Capildeo for Trick Vessels:
“Reading Andre Bagoo is an experience like none other. He is a true Caribbean poet: the reader is lapped in gorgeous, disturbing words; immersed in a nurturing, disintegrative sea. He is also, and marvellously, a poet who speaks to our times. Bagoo’s background in law and journalism informs the disabused eye he...
4 tags
“I am afraid of earth, the way it holds us,
making useless things out of wings.”
– Kei Miller, There is an Anger that Moves
4 tags
“Nothing ever happens twice.”
– Wislawa Szymborska, ‘Nothing Twice’
