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Fugue and Other Poems
This collection reasserts the significant work of the writer and intellectual Neville Dawes, whose poetry has been unavailable since the late 1950s. A lifelong Marxist and a lover of English literature, Dawes’s concern for the rural Jamaican working class is evident in the poems that celebrate his youth in the village of Sturge Town, Jamaica. Written between 1950 and 1970, these inspiring poems show that the strength provided by heritage can overcome the difficulties posed by the social and political hardships of modern life. An introduction and several poems written by Dawes's son, Kwame Davis, are also included.
Wisteria
"In Wisteria, Kwame Dawes finds poignant meaning in the landscape and history of Sumter, a small town in central South Carolina. Here the voices of women who lived through most of the twentieth century - teachers, beauticians, seamstresses, domestic workers and farming folk - unfold with the raw honesty of people who have waited for a long time to finally speak their mind. The poems move with the narrative of stories long repeated but told with fresh emotion each time, with the lyrical depth of a blues threnody or a negro spiritual, and with the flame and shock of a prophet forced to speak the hardest truths. These are poems of beauty and insight that pay homage to the women who told Dawes t...
A Place to Hide
A man lies in a newspaper-lined room dreaming an other life. Bob Marley's spirit flew into him at the moment of the singer's death. A woman detaches herself from her perfunctory husband and finds the erotic foreplay she longs for in journeying round the island. A man climbs Blue Mountain Peak to fly and hear the voice of God. Sonia paints her new friend Joan and hopes that this will be the beginning of a sexual adventure. Dawes's characters are driven by their need for intimate contact with people and with God, and their need to construct personal myths powerful enough to live by. In a host of distinctive and persuasive voices they tell stories that reveal their inner lives and give an incis...
Progeny of Air
Winner of the prize for the best first collection in the Forward Poetry Prize of 1994, Progeny of Air explores a childhood and youth spent in 1970's Jamaica. The collection links inner personal experience and social and historical perspectives to mutually enriching effect.
Nebraska
Kwame Dawes is not a native Nebraskan. Born in Ghana, he later moved to Jamaica, where he spent most of his childhood and early adulthood. In 1992 he relocated to the United States and eventually found himself an American living in Lincoln, Nebraska. In Nebraska, this beautiful and evocative collection of poems, Dawes explores a theme constant in his work—the intersection of memory, home, and artistic invention. The poems, set against the backdrop of Nebraska’s discrete cycle of seasons, are meditative even as they search for a sense of place in a new landscape. While he shovels snow or walks in the bitter cold to his car, he is engulfed with memories of Kingston, yet when he travels, he finds himself longing for the open space of the plains and the first snowfall. With a strong sense of place and haunting memories, Dawes grapples with life in Nebraska as a transplant. Purchase the audio edition.
Impossible Flying
Dawes' most personal and universal collection, 'telling family secrets to strangers'. The family secrets focus primarily on the triangular relationship between the poet, his father and younger brother.
Fugue and Other Writings
This collection of work by the late Neville Dawes (1926-1984) makes available the fine poems that Dawes wrote, mostly between 1950-1970, some of which appeared in a long-vanished, slim volume, Sepia, published in Ghana in the late 1950s. In the poems, the Marxist, modernist, ideologically committed Neville Dawes returns again and again to Sturge Town, the village of his youth, a world of "ancestral rooting". The collection includes the short stories broadcast on the Caribbean Voices radio programme, justly hailed as special events by such stern editors as Edgar Mittelholzer. There are several pieces of autobiographical writing, which in their insight and humour make one wish that Dawes had w...
Requiem
In these 'shrines of remembrance' for the millions of the victims of transatlantic slavery, Kwame Dawes constructs a sequence which laments, rages, mourns, but also celebrates survival. Focusing on individual moments in this holocaust which lasted nearly four hundred years, these poems both cauterize a lingering infection and offer the oil of healing. In these taut lyric pieces, Dawes achieves what might seem impossible: saying something fresh about a subject which, despite attempts at historical amnesia, will not go away. He does it by eschewing sentimentality, rant or playing to the audience, black or white. His poems go to the heart of the historical experience and its contemporary reverberations. This sequence was inspired by the award-winning book, The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo by the American artist Tom Feelings.
Duppy Conqueror
"[Dawes] is highly original and intelligent, possessing poetic sensibility that is rooted and sound, unshakeable and unstopped, both in its vibrancy and direction. He writes poetry as it ought to be written."—World Literature Today "Dawes asserts himself as man and artist and finally, with grace achieved and grace said, sits down to begin life's tragic feast . . . a writer of major significance."—Brag Book "The notion of a reggae aesthetic—of the language moving to a different rhythm, under different kinds of pressure . . . underpins all Dawes' work as poet."—Stewart Brown Born in Ghana, raised in Jamaica, and educated in Canada, Kwame Dawes is a dynamic and electrifying poet. In thi...
One Love
A new play for Britain's leading black theatre company, with a premiere at London's Lyric Theatre in July 2001 Hot, humid, downtown Kingston, Jamaica. The 1970s. Streets pulse with reggae, rhythm and dub. Brotherman is a local Rastafarian guru who heals, preaches and tries hard to live a righteous life. When he gives a homeless young country girl a space in his house, the volatile neighbourhood is sparked into jealousy and violence. Meanwhile, her growing love for him tests his commitment to a pure, spiritual life. Commissioned by Talawa, Britain's leading black theatre company, and inspired by Roger Mais' classic novel Brotherman, One Love takes us to the heart of the Jamaican soul, as actors, dancers, singers, live musicians and a DJ draw on influences such as Bob Marley and Lee 'Scratch' Perry to tell this powerful parable of desire and denial.
