Slips from Grace

Alan Thomas is a professor of English at the University of Toronto.

Hope Anderson is a Caribbean-born poet who has lived in New York and Montreal and is now on the West Coast. His range of reference is international and his poetry touches black consciousness in different countries and of different kinds: Burning Spear going into the bush, Bob Marley making music, dreadlocks smoking. The poet also, while watching the long line of ships the european armada parades across the seas of history ...

(“Hearsay”) reflects on the impingement of European culture upon black. It’s a confusing world and Anderson’s poetry generally works to present this confusion by gathering up fragments of experience — ideas, sensations, cityscapes, sounds of radio and TV — in a kaleidoscopic heap. This kind of impressionism, a sort of shorthand reporting in brief cryptic lines, sometimes leaves the reader groping for meaning, and looking for explanation to the title or the dedication (of which, incidentally, there are many, to family, musicians, artists, and other poets). The consciousness of the poet is the focus of all these impressions. Anderson writes

I walk the street, singing
small disguise / protection against warm main

(“for Scott Watson”) and one poem in this lengthy collection, “Cool Running, “ is actually a song with verse and refrain in a Jamaican idiom, a smooth, effortless piece. But for the most part the poet’s music is the whirring of the brain, thinking, reflecting, accumulating, and it is rarely simple tunes which are conveyed from this complex, sensitive mind.