This collection brings together a selection of poetry from Faustin Charles’s previous works as well as many new poems from this important voice in Caribbean poetry. As a Trinidadian whose
writing career has been spent in the United Kingdom, Charles is a pioneer of the diasporic consciousness whose work has sought to uncover what is essential in the Caribbean cultural heritage
and explore the experience of separation and the establishment of new connections. The new poems from this volume focus on the lives of the young with a Blakean concern for the quality and
integrity of childhood experience. These are both songs of innocence and experience, of what ought to be, and, as in “Stephen’s Song,” of a young life snuffed out by racism.
