wonderfully messy. Kwame Dawes says McCallum’s work is the ‘closest thing to a marriage between [the African-American] Lucille Clifton and [the Jamaican poet] Lorna Goodison’. Michael Waters, on the other hand, agrees about Clifton but says the other half of the union is Derek Walcott. Of course neither critic is trying to imply that the poet’s voice is the product of only two ‘parents’ and not indeed the product of every voice (poetic or otherwise) they have internalised. For my part, I don’t see the clear stamp of Walcott on McCallum – not that I doubt his influence is there, and perhaps, how could it not be? But if, as I suspect, Waters meant to say McCallum’s voice is distinctly Caribbean and distinctly good, then there is no disagreement. She claims a Caribbean identity despite not ‘looking’ Caribbean – at least, not in the exotifying gaze of a world that has made ‘natives’ only of the black and Indian populations. McCallum writes of an encounter with Bob Marley:

… Bob, who was only a brother in Twelve Tribes to me at four or five, said to the man who called me whitey gal that I was not, that I was a daughter of Israel, that I was Stair’s child.

(‘What I’m Telling You’, p. 88)

Jamaica is her home and she mourns having had to leave the island. In her ‘mermaid sequence’, you will find a powerful metaphor for migration and all its sadness: ‘The tragedy of the mermaid’

is not that she must leave her home but that she must cast off her flesh. To love, she must lose scales as a child relinquishes dolls to youth;

(‘The tragedy of the mermaid’, p. 91)

and from another poem in the same cycle:

With age, your hair will grow matted and dull, your skin will gape and hang in long folds, your eyes will cease to shine. But nothing will be enough. The sea will never take you back.

(‘What the Oracle Said’, p.92)

Migration happens in the opposite direction for Loretta Collins Klobah and she disrupts simple notions of what is Caribbean and what is Caribbean poetry. Born in the United States, with an MFA from the prestigious Iowa Workshop, she has since claimed the Caribbean in much the way that introduction xi