like ornaments of an inexhaustible Christmas?’

(‘Dialogue’, p. 14)

What Phipps-Kettlewell does, however, share with Goodison is a refusal to shy away from the spiritual. Her poetry is in constant conversation with God, but this conversation is carried out in a language so fresh it never becomes mere rhetoric or even ‘religious’. Phipps-Kettlewell’s embrace of God is essentially an awareness of human frailty and smallness, and this awareness invites us to transcend ourselves:

Yet we too must go one day beyond ourselves and realize at last what in fantasies and rites we had already

(‘On Good Friday’, p. 19)

or she asks her readers to imagine themselves as a frog,

able to leap a distance many times your own measure

(‘Frog’, p. 4)

It is impossible not to see Brathwaite in the work of Ian Strachan. In his use of rhythm and physical layout (often intimately related to Brathwaite’s) there is the echo of that great Barbadian’s trilogy The Arrivants. Consider Brathwaite’s ‘Folkways’ and Strachan’s ‘Mae Hanna, Grandmother’ side by side:

I am a fuckin’ negro man, hole in my head, brains in my belly; black skin red eyes broad back big you know what: not very quick to take offence but once offended, watch that housee you livin’ in

‘teacher wan’ teach her more dan da gold an’ rule’

bloodnight man gone mangrove man grovin’ stronger erry day whip spawn introduction xiii