Over the last few decades Caribbean writers - performance poets, newspaper poets, singer-songwriters - have created a genuinely popular art form, a poetry heard by audiences all over the world. At the same time, even at its most literary, Caribbean poetry shares the vigour of the oral tradition. Writers like Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, and many other exciting new voices, are exploring ways of capturing the vitality of the spoken word on the page. Both of these traditions are represented in this lively anthology, which traces Caribbean verse from its roots to the present.

The Caribbean has produced one of the most vigorous and exciting bodies of poetry of the last one hundred year. The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse is the only contemporary anthology to present the best of the English-language poetry of the region alongside selections from the poetry of boththe French and Spanish Caribbean. Featuring a range of established poets from Derek Walcott to Jesus Cos Causse, Olive Senior to Aime Cesaire, as well as exciting new voices, this is a rich and challenging book.

Contemporary Caribbean Women's Poetry provides detailed readings of individual poems by women poets whose work has not yet received the sustained critical attention it deserves. These readings are contextualized both within Caribbean cultural debates and postcolonial and feminist critical discourses in a lively and engaged way; revisiting nationalist debates as well as topical issues about the performance of gendered and raced identities within poetic discourse. Newly available in paperback, this book is groundbreaking reading for all those interested in postcolonialism, Gender Studies, Caribbean Studies and contemporary poetry.

Leo Oakley ; Evelyn O'Callaghan ; Jean Rhys ; Tom Redcam (Thomas Madcermot) ; Victor Stafford Reid ; Gordon Rohlehr ; Reinhard Sander ; Dennis Scott ; Lawrence Scott ; Karl Sealey ; Samuel Selvon ; A.J. Seymour ; P.M. Sherlock ; Rajkumari Singh ; Mikey Smith ; Henry Swanzy ; Tropica (Mary Adella Wolcott) ; John Vidal ; Derek Walcott ; A.R.F. Webber ; Sarah Lawson Welsh ; Sylvia Wynter ; Benjamin Zephaniah.

Caribbean poetry written in English has been attracting growing amounts of scholarly attention. The first substantial annotated bibliography of primary and secondary materials related to the topic, this reference chronicles the development of Anglophone Caribbean poetry from 1970 through 2001. Included are nearly 900 entries for anthologies, reference works, conference proceedings, critical studies, interviews, and recorded works. The volume also includes a chronology, an overview of the development and significance of Caribbean poetry in English, and extensive indexes. In 1971 the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies held a conference on West Indian literature at the University of the West Indies. This was the first assembly for the discussion of West Indian literature by West Indian people on West Indian soil. Since then, interest in Caribbean poetry written in English has grown dramatically. Caribbean poetry was influenced by the American Black Power movement during the 1970s, and women poets began to contribute their voices throughout the 1980s. Caribbean poets have, in turn, gained greater access to publishing outlets, resulting in a wider international readership and a corresponding increase in scholarly and critical studies. This book is the first substantial annotated bibliography of primary and secondary materials related to Caribbean poetry written in English. The volume begins with the rise of interest in Anglophone Caribbean poetry in the 1970s and continues through 2001. Included are entries for nearly 900 anthologies, reference works, conference proceedings, critical studies, interviews, and recordings. The entries are grouped in chapters devoted to particular types of works. In addition, the volume includes a chronology, a discussion of the history of Anglophone Caribbean poetry, and extensive indexes.

For the first time the Dutch-speaking regions of the Caribbean and Suriname are brought into fruitful dialogue with another major American literature, that of the anglophone Caribbean. The results are as stimulating as they are unexpected. The editors have coordinated the work of a distinguished international team of specialists. Read separately or as a set of three volumes, the History of Literature in the Caribbean is designed to serve as the primary reference book in this area. The reader can follow the comparative evolution of a literary genre or plot the development of a set of historical problems under the appropriate heading for the English- or Dutch-speaking region. An extensive index to names and dates of authors and significant historical figures completes the volume. The subeditors bring to their respective specialty areas a wealth of Caribbeanist experience. Vera M. Kutzinski is Professor of English, American, and Afro-American Literature at Yale University. Her book Sugar's Secrets: Race and The Erotics of Cuban Nationalism, 1993, treated a crucial subject in the romance of the Caribbean nation. Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger has been very active in Latin American and Caribbean literary criticism for two decades, first at the Free University in Berlin and later at the University of Maryland. The editor of A History of Literature in the Caribbean, A. James Arnold, is Professor of French at the University of Virginia, where he founded the New World Studies graduate program. Over the past twenty years he has been a pioneer in the historical study of the Négritude movement and its successors in the francophone Caribbean.