Startling the Flying Fish

The unifying voice of this symphonic sequence of poems is that of Cariwoma, an oracular Caribbean woman, who incarnates the spirit of the islands and mainland with their Old World/New World encounters and scattered linkages of migration. The poems, like the sea that informs her voice, move freely back and forth in time with a meditational serenity. Cariwoma's reflections on landscape, myth and history; her entanglements with figures as diverse as Cassandra, Columbus and spider-god Anansi; the lives of her overseas children are all collected here in this exciting new work from Grace Nichols.