Caribbean people have claimed the rest of the world – Christian Campbell’s ‘Rudical’:

Mine New Cross mine Oldham Notting Hill Bradford Brixton mine too Nassau Laventille Bridgetown Kingston

(p. 56)

Indeed, for Loretta Collins Klobah, hers is America, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, English, Spanish, Spanglish, Patois. She claims space and language without earnestness or apology, ironically, even when the poem is running away from the Caribbean:

Yes, this poem is on the run – until the Caribbean is ready to greet this poem like we meet friends in Puerto Rico, with a besito – with a saludos, with an embrace. See what I mean?

(‘Going Up, Going Down’, p. 61)

When she is the social critic, Collins Klobah never speaks from a place that is outside or superior. Her voice embodies the communal we, our, us:

We have created a new world where the indiscriminate gun is always at our backs. From the first murdered Taino to now, the cosmic bullet has been in the air. The carved moon trots across the sky. Let us rock our babies to sleep, kissing their hair, rearranging their night clothes, playing our odds against carnage, against the stray shot seeking our thresholds.

(‘El Valerio, The Wake (1893), p. 59)

Like Lorna Goodison and Derek Walcott, Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell is a poet as well as a painter. Unlike her ‘forebears’ however, Phipps-Kettlewell is equally accomplished in both arts. If her work is ‘Caribbean’ it is because it is rooted in the actual land rather than in a regional canon. In a recent interview she was asked about the influence of other Haitian writers on her work and responded that there wasn’t much: ‘[T]he people of Haiti themselves have influenced my work… the Kreyol language is expressed in, and sustained by, an incredible sense of imagery.’ For Phipps-Kettlewell, the past and childhood are constant sources of inspiration:

– ‘When will my poem end? How can it end while fruits from my childhood still hang on trees xii

New Caribbean Poetry