Christian Campbell. Photograph by Sammy Rawal, courtesy Peepal Tree Press

Today is Independence Day here in Trinidad and Tobago — parades, flags, fireworks — and today we also wrap up the current issue of the CRB with three last features.

First, a portfolio of images from the painted wilde bussen — minibuses — of Paramaribo, accompanied by a short essay by your Antilles blogger. Decorated with hand-painted portraits of film stars and musicians, action heroes and politicians, the wilde bussen are a moving gallery of public art offering fascinating hints about the ideals and fantasies of contemporary Surinamese.

Next, the CRB’s “Also noted” column returns, with capsule reviews of ten recent books: poetry by M. NourbeSe Philip, Marion Bethel, and Jacqueline Bishop; a memoir by the late E.A. Markham; a new translation of a 1916 book by a pioneering Puerto Rican feminist; books on reggaeton and Haitian migrants; and more.

Finally, regular CRB contributor Lisa Allen-Agostini interviews the Bahamian poet Christian Campbell, whose debut book, Running the Dusk, was recently shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Campbell talks about his influences, literary and otherwise, about the shaping of his poetic voice, the texture of dusk in his book, and his sense of rootedness in multiple Caribbean locations:

I was raised by a Bahamian and a Trinidadian, and I was raised as a Bahamian and a Trinidadian. There’s also Grenada and Colombia/Venezuela (to open up the arc), and there’s likely Haiti somewhere down the line.

My breed of Caribbean person is not strange at all. I’m a UWI baby — my parents met at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine. In the diaspora, and Toronto in particular, it makes perfect sense, because there is a lot of this cross-Caribbean mix-up business. The thing is, we haven’t really talked enough about what this means.

At a very early age, I knew the troubles and limits of nationalism and I know that I must also make trouble for the nation. My heritage gave me an innate sense of the broadness of the Caribbean and the many Caribbeans — “broader than Broadway,” as Barrington Levy would put it. It grounds me in my ability to fully draw on the spiritual resources of all the Caribbeans. It’s all mine.

Look out for a review of Running the Dusk in a future issue of the CRB.

And now that this issue of the magazine has closed, your Antilles blogger is hard at work on the September CRB, which will start publication next week Tuesday. I’m happy to say that this issue will include not only our usual coverage of books and visual art, but also a special section on Caribbean film, and our first regular music column. But more about those next week!

• Revival of Paul Simon/Derek Walcott’s Capeman opens in NYC in August: http://bit.ly/bxdLLX

• Trinidadian Marlon Griffith wins 2010 Commonwealth Connections international arts residency: http://bit.ly/9y7e2o

• Announcing @Carifringe: an annual regional arts festival hosted in Nassau, launching October 2010: http://bit.ly/aXkXpw

• Bahamian Christian Campbell shortlisted for Forward Prize for best first collection: http://bit.ly/9cahf2

• Draconian Switch 13: Cozier, Smailes, Ashraph, Rawlins, Vasquez, Bolai: http://bit.ly/bhZeLZ

• George Elliott Clarke on the Calabash poetry anthology, So Much Things to Say: http://bit.ly/aR97gM

• Mediapart on Anthony Joseph’s recent performance in Arles (report in French + video footage): http://bit.ly/bCCu2j

• Lesley McDowell reviews Kei Miller’s The Last Warner Woman in the Glasgow Herald: http://bit.ly/csxOH7

Christian Campbell

The shortlists for the 2010 Forward Prizes for Poetry were announced today. The UK Guardian suggests that

An expected clash between Nobel laureates Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott on the shortlist for this year’s Forward prize for best poetry collection has been averted, after Walcott’s latest collection failed to make the cut.

(The paper’s correspondent delicately declines to make any link between Walcott’s absence from the list and the fact that this year’s judging panel is chaired by Ruth Padel.)

But the real news for Caribbean readers is that the Bahamian poet Christian Campbell’s Running the Dusk has been shortlisted for the best first collection prize. This is a good time to dip into the CRB archive and re-read Campbell’s poem “Goodman’s Bay”, published more than five years ago in our February 2005 issue:

We run the dusk
at dusk. Everything
is open and live
with silence. All viscera.
God, there is too much
red in the sky . . .