Resisting the Anomie

Roger Nash is a professor of philosophy at Laurentian University, and
the editor of Spring-Feaver: An Anthology of Poems from the Ontario
Division of the League of Canadian Poets.

This second book of poetry by Kwame Dawes, a Ghanaian-born Jamaican, is
a mixed bag. There is an unfinished quality to some of the poems, and
occasional lapses into flat language (“Lisa plucks from my head / a
thick strand of white / I feel old now”).

Other poems merit serious attention. A number examine West Indian
womanhood, both as an object of oppression and as a bestower of
immensely powerful blessings. In “Blue Gospel,” deceptively simple
language is freighted with multiple layers of meaning—a trademark of
Dawes at his best—as a woman’s gospel singing transforms the
hearer’s lust. Joy and despair are powerfully combined in the suite
“Haiti,” which gives us the image of a woman in the gutter, weeping
and kneading her breasts as if to nour-ish a whole village. The driving
musicality in

some of these poems suggests that Dawes has learned much from Bob Marley
about how to fuse physical grace with emancipatory energy.

Dawes prefaces the book with a striking autobiographical essay on the
dangerous paradox of a colonial literature that simultaneously enriches
and fetters the imagination.