SARGASSO


The Caribbean Writer, 1, no. 1 (Spring 1987).



 It is a pleasure to review The Caribbean Writer, a
new literary journal from the Caribbean Research
Institute of the University of the Virgin Islands.
In editor Erika J. Smilowitz's words, "to read this first
issue is to know the vastness of the Caribbean. An
archipelago of numerous large and small islands stretching
between two continents, a sea of 750,000 square miles, it
is also a community of vastly different peoples, languages
and cultures." This community is reflected in the
"amalgam of various subjects and perspectives" that is
the poetry and short fiction chosen for this premiere
issue of a journal that seems destined to "encourage
quality and to showcase Caribbean writing."

 'Guest poems' by Derek Walcott, Toi Derricotte, and
Lawrence Lieberman aside, the poetry is of impressive
quality. In it one reads of the sounds of things, of
"flame tree time" (Elaine Savory), of island fever, of
the "fragile Caribbean night," of "voodoo hymns" (Patricia
M. Fagan), of "Wooing Lady Luck in Philipsburg" (Donna
Baier Stein), of cricketers sipping tea "under a ninety
degree" (J. Robert Creque), of "the conch horns of the
eastern Maroons" (Joseph Bruchac), of mulatto Christs,
of great men and greater castles, of hurricane season, of
body bags in Grenada, of "Poverty's hut" (Patsy Anne
Bickerstaff), of tourist days and nights, of a land
"lashed/until it bled and oozed/and all the palm trees
died" (Joan Kelsey Eltman). Here is the Caribbean
context; these are her voices of sorrow and joy, terror
and dream, struggle and triumph. Patricia M. Fagan's
"Schoolday" places the general excellence of the poetry:

 Mangoes on the road
 Sister Mary say, "the North Pole
 on top of the earth."
 Mangoose chase iguana
 'round the tamon tree.