Geoffrey Philp’s new poetry assortment, Archipelagos (Peepal Tree Press, 2023) will on the cabinets on March 16. Roger Robinson writes: “Archipelagos is a ebook that will get underneath the diseased pores and skin of historical past’s oppressors, and the disconcerting quiet fallout of catastrophe. It doesn’t sound like enjoyable however the impact on the reader is extremely liberating, placing them in an omniscient viewpoint that brings inside them an understanding of the world’s ebb and circulate, historical past, injury and therapeutic. [. . .]” [Also see previous post Geoffrey Philp awarded Silver Musgrave Medal.]
Description: That is poetry written within the time of onrushing international catastrophe, of a racist and nonetheless imperial USA and of Black lives matter. It’s a name to arms that opens out the wrestle for human survival within the epoch of the Anthropocene to remind us that this started not simply within the factories of Europe however within the holds of the slave ships and plantations of the Caribbean. No pure world was extra modified than the West Indian islands by sugar monoculture – and, because the title poem begins: “On the finish of this sentence, a flood will rise/ and swallow low-lying islands of the Caribbean”. Traditionally, “the particles of empire that crowd our shores” connects to the “sands of our seashores / suffering from masks and plastic bottles.”
Philp’s highly effective and chic poems span previous and current and make it very clear that there can’t be an ethical response to the local weather disaster that isn’t additionally embedded within the wrestle for social justice, for overcoming the malignancies of empire and colonialism and the ability of world capitalism – the missions of the West that at all times had and nonetheless have at their coronary heart the ideology of white supremacy and a capitalism endlessly voracious for the world’s human and pure assets. These are poems of wit and anger, but additionally of private intimacy – coping with the vexed relationship with a violent father – and provides us line after line of the shapeliest poetry – in sound, in rhythm and the precise alternative of phrase.
Geoffrey Philp is a Jamaican writer of poetry, quick tales, novels and youngsters’s books. Philp teaches artistic writing at Miami Dade School and has a Grasp of Arts in English from the College of Miami. Peepal Tree has revealed eight of his books (with a ninth forthcoming). An enormous supporter of Caribbean books and writers, he posts interviews, fiction, poetry, podcasts, and literary occasions from the Caribbean and South Florida on his weblog. In 2022, he was awarded the Silver Musgrave Medal for excellent advantage in literature.
For extra info, see https://www.peepaltreepress.com/books/archipelagos