Stephen Tyrone Williams and Johnny Ferro in Children of God, directed by Kareem Mortimer. Photograph courtesy the trinidad+tobago film festival

The September 2010 issue of the CRB wraps up today, with the publication of our latest “Also noted” column, featuring brief reviews of ten recent books from and about the Caribbean. (They include Cecil Gray’s latest book of poems, two coming-of-age novels set in contemporary Trinidad, scholarly books on Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, and a series of guides to Caribbean street food).

As regular Antilles readers know, this issue of the CRB also includes a special section on recent Caribbean film, supported by the trinidad+tobago film festival 2010. Here’s a roundup of the seven films we’ve reviewed, in case you missed one or two:

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Could you be loved
Nicholas Laughlin on Children of God, directed by Kareem Mortimer

Gold fever
Georgia Popplewell on Orpailleur, directed by Marc Barrat

There will be blood
Jane Bryce on La Soga, directed by Josh Crook

Songs of the road
Ian Craig on Los Viajes del Viento, directed by Ciro Guerra

The return of the native
Dylan Kerrigan on The Amerindians, directed by Tracy Assing and Sophie Meyer

Addicted to rockstone
Kellie Magnus on The Upsetter: The Life and Music of Lee “Scratch” Perry, directed by Ethan Higbee and Adam Bhala Lough

Colour wheel
Andre Bagoo on Coolie Pink and Green, directed by Patricia Mohammed

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We’re very pleased the ttff decided to support this special film coverage, and we hope their partnership with the CRB will continue in some form.

You can see the full contents of the now-complete September 2010 issue here — now is a good time to catch up with anything you missed during the busy past eight weeks. Some highlights: Vahni Capildeo’s survey of the late Guyanese poet Mahadai Das; Mervyn Morris’s essay on the life and poetic achievement of Wayne Brown; Melissa Richards on Anton Nimblett’s short fiction; J. Michael Dash on Matthew J. Smith’s political history of Haiti in the mid-twentieth century; and Edwidge Danticat’s moving essay on writing and reading in dangerous times.

And now to gear up for the launch of the November issue . . .

The Leaf in His Ear

Left, the golden leaf bears from his ear.
At eighteen, Bushman fighting to control diamonds
in his glass head. The waters of the river
swirl by.

I and I Rastaman, with knotty India hair, has long ago ceased.
The good Lord swallowed him up.
Into Guiana forests. North-west.
Dogs bark and howl.
In this first of May day, the Almighty is rain,
voices, wind in banana suckers.

The poem that lends its title to A Leaf in His Ear, the collected poems of Mahadai Das, exemplifies what her publisher calls the “oblique, gnomic” style of her later writing. Das, who died in 2003 at the tragically early age of forty-eight, published three collections of poems and did not manage to complete her fourth. “There is no way Mahadai Das’s work can ever be other than an unfinished project,” writes Jeremy Poynting of Peepal Tree Press. “Readers need to be trusted to see what is absolutely essential and fully accomplished in her work.” A Leaf in His Ear, edited by the Guyanese scholar Denise De Caires Narain Gurnah, assembles the poems from Das’s three previous books with forty-two uncollected poems ranging from her whole career. This is a book I’ve been looking forward to for the better part of a decade. I’m thrilled to have it in my hands at last, and a full review will appear soon in the CRB.

De Caires Narain Gurnah writes:

The poems collected here are characterised by a restless determination and energy as well as by unexpected and startling imagery. Amidst the air of sorrow that permeates many of these poems, there is a sharp wit and a keenly reflexive intellect at work sifting through the joys, disappointments, frustrations, and pain of a life lived through the fervour of nationalism and the bitter realities of independence in Guyana under Burnham and the mass migrations that followed . . . The trajectory her work charts from nationalism to disillusionment is not uncommon amongst Caribbean poets; what is distinctive about Das’s oeuvre is that this shift is so dramatically and decisively mapped. This, along with the space (I am tempted to say “jangling”) dissonance of her poetic voice and the intensity of the work, make hers a powerful and unique contribution to Caribbean poetry.

You can follow that “trajactory . . . from nationalism to disillusionment” even in the titles of Das’s three previous books. I Want to Be a Poetess of My People (1976) includes the much-anthologised “They Came in Ships”, memorialising the Caribbean’s Indian immigrants. My Finer Steel Will Grow (1982) suggests a determined turning inward, a phase of reflection. Bones (1988) explores even deeper privacies, or more private depths. Illness during the final decade of her life made writing difficult, and the handful of strange, startling poems that end this volume have been lost to us for too long.

Read two more of Mahadai Das’s later poems in the February 2010 issue of Town.