Peepal Tree Press Ltd – förlag

This outstanding second collection explores the lives of errant women and creatures who refuse to adhere to official paths, and the liminal, boundary-crossing wildscapes of the land and heart.

These tender, lyrical, daring poems learn from the natural world, through immersion and observation, to find new ways to reflect and adapt, as they celebrate the ways our beings and bodies are inextricably entangled with the ever-changing landscapes and heartscapes of the dark woods, glittering rivers, windswept moors and towering mountains.

Roger Robinson’s range is wide: the joys and pains of family life; observations on the threatening edge of violence below the surface energies of Black British territories in London; memories of an older Trinidad and visits that tell him both how he and the country have changed; emblematic poems on the beauty and often bizarre strangeness of the world of animals; quizzical responses to the strange, the heartening, and the appalling in incidents encountered in daily life; reflections on the purposes and costs of making art, as in fine poems on a George Stubbs’ painting, cocaine and Coltrane’s Ascension, and questioning thoughts on the ideologies of Toni Morrison and John Milton. The poems express a fierce anger against injustice, but also convey the irrepressible sense that Roger Robinson cannot help but love people for their humour, oddity and generosity of spirit.'With A Portable Paradise, Roger Robinson shows us that he can be the voice of our communal consciousness, while at the same time always subverting, playing and beguiling with his beautiful verse' Afua Hirsch

This dual Spanish-English collection of poems by a Venezuelan poet focuses on the island nature of his country’s Caribbean coast. Its rich observation of physical island-scapes is realised in imagery that strikes both with its freshness and rightness, and its speculative concern with the nature of islands in the Western imagination challenges us to new points of view. Robin Myers’ translation is both subtle and beautiful.

This fictionalised autobiography gives a richly woven portrait of Kamla's life from early childhood to the point where she leaves her family, Pasea village and Trinidad to attend university in the UK. It gives a vivid and inward picture of a Caribbean community still in touch with its roots, seen from the developing perspective of a young woman at the crossroads of diverse social, cultural and religious influences. The portrait bears witness to the moral strengths of the community as well as showing Kamla's growing awareness of the repressions and hypocrisies of its treatment of women. From early in her life Kamla is surprised by a contrary inner voice which frequently gainsays the wisdom of her elders and betters. But Kamla is growing up in a traditional Hindu community and attending schools in colonial Trinidad where rote learning is still the order of the day. She learns that this voice creates nothing but trouble and silences it. In this book the voice is freed.Set in the 1940s, Butterfly in the Wind was enthusiastically received when it first appeared in 1990. Its portrayal of a passage from childhood to young womanhood was praised by The Sunday Times as "a sweet-natured book which is above all a tremendous celebration of life". The Observer praised it for "the empathy with which Lakshmi Persaud writes of the natural world... and Hindu customs".Lakshmi Persaud was born in 1939 in Trinidad. She is the author of Butterfly in the Wind, Sastra and For the Love of My Name. She lives in London.

Beryl Gilroy transports the reader back to the Guyanese village of her childhood over sixty years ago to meet such characters as Mr Dewsbury the Dog Doctor, Mama Darlin' the village midwife and Mr Cumberbatch the Chief Mourner. It was a time when "children did not have open access to the world of adults and childhood had not yet disappeared", and perhaps for this reason, the men and women who pass through these stories have a mystery and singularity which are as unforgettable for the reader as they were for the child.Beryl Gilroy brings back to life a whole, rich Afro-Guyanese village community, where there were old people who had been slaves as children and Africa was not forgotten."Beryl Gilroy is an artist. She wields her pen the way an artist wields a paintbrush. A few firm lines, a few quick strokes, a touch of color here, a splash of color there, precise shading elsewhere, and presto! A portrait in miniature. Gilroy's vignettes in her collection entitled Sunlight on Sweet Water, do indeed dance like sunlight on the sweet water of the Caribbean or sunlight reflected from Guiana's numerous waterways. They are pithy portraits of persons, places, objects, and events which allow the Caribbean reader to revel in nostalgia and permit the non-Caribbean a peek into that part of the region that is not dressed up to lure tourists. These short pieces reveal the heart and soul of the area and remind the world that the Caribbean, travel brochures to the contrary, is not just a playground for the idle and not-so-idle rich. The Caribbean is home to those persons who have traveled out, and to those who have remained to keep the hearth burning and the heart alive and well." Phyllis Briggs-Emanuel, The Caribbean WriterBeryl Gilroy came to London over fifty years ago from Guyana. She wrote six novels, two autobiographical books and was a pioneering teacher and psychotherapist. Sadly, she died in 2000 at the age of 76.

After false starts in teaching and social work, Melda Hayley finds her mission in fostering the damaged children of the first generation of black settlers in a deeply racist Britain. But though Melda finds daily uplift in her work, her inner life starts to come apart. Her brother Arnie has married a white woman and his defection from the family and the distress Melda witnesses in the children she fosters causes her own buried wounds to weep. Melda confronts the cruelties she has suffered as the 'outside child' at the hands of her stepmother. But though the past drives Melda towards breakdown, she finds strengths there too, especially in the memories of the loving, supporting women of the yards. And there is Pa who, in his new material security in the USA, discovers a gentle caring side and teaches his family to sing in praise of love and children.Beryl Gilroy came to London over fifty years ago from Guyana. She wrote six novels, two autobiographical books and was a pioneering teacher and psychotherapist. Sadly, she died in 2000 at the age of 76.

As a young man of twenty, Thomas Inkle sets out for Barbados to inspect the family sugar estates. On the way he is shipwrecked on a small West Indian island inhabited by Carib Indians. He alone escapes as his shipmates are slaughtered, and is rescued by Yarico, a Carib woman who takes him as, 'an ideal, strange and obliging lover.' So begins an erotic encounter, explored with poetic, imaginative intensity, which has a profound effect on both.Amongst the Caribs, Inkle is a mere child, whose survival depends entirely on Yarico's favour and protection. But when he is rescued and taken with Yarico to the slave island of Barbados, she is entirely at his mercy.Inkle and Yarico is loosely based on a 'true' story which became a much repeated popular narrative in the 17th and 18th centuries. Beryl Gilroy reinterprets its mythic dimensions from both a woman's and a black perspective, but above all she engages the reader in the psychological truths of her characters' experiences.As an old man, Inkle recalls the Carib's stories as being like 'fresh dreams, newly washed, newly woven and true to the daily lives of the community'. Inkle and Yarico has the same magic and pertinence. As a narrative of deep historical insight into the commodification and abuse of humanity, Gilroy lays the past bare as a text for the present.Beryl Gilroy came to London over fifty years ago from Guyana. She wrote six novels, two autobiographical books and was a pioneering teacher and psychotherapist. Sadly, she died in 2000 at the age of 76.

In the 1950s and early 1960s no Anglophone Caribbean novelist had a higher profile and was more praised than Edgar Mittelholzer. He was the first Caribbean writer to earn his living from writing and his earlier novels in particular found enthusiastic reviewers in the UK and USA. But after his suicide in 1965 his reputation sank and until Peepal Tree began republishing his earlier writing in 2007, for several decades, none of his books were in print. This collection of essays charts both the way Mittelholzer’s work was read in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, and shows how a contemporary generation of critics is rediscovering his real merits – the quality of his prose, his literary ambition and the ways in which at least some of Mittelholzer’s ideas about the Caribbean speak to a postnationalist generation. The essays in this collection explore Mittelholzer’s treatment of race and the divided person, of sexuality, history, heredity and the charge that he wrote pornography. More recent essays discuss his formal inventiveness in exploring analogies for musical forms, the leitmotiv in his fiction, and the diversity of genres he employs in his short stories. Contributors include A.J. Seymour, Michael Gilkes, Joyce Sparer and an important biographical essay from Mittelholzer’s widow, Jacqueline Ward. More recent critics include Keith Jardim, J. Dillon Brown, Juanita Cox and Jeremy Poynting. The collection is edited by Juanita Cox, whose research on Mittelholzer’s life and writing has played an important role in the rediscovery of this important Caribbean writer.

Red is a powerful new anthology of work by Black British poets.

"Perhaps the most significant thing to be said about Red is that the poets in this volume burst through any constraining label with writing that throbs and pulses and seeps and flows." Margaret Busby

Featuring: Jackie Kay * Patience Agbabi * Nii Ayikwei Parkes * Raman Mundair * Maya Chowdhry * Dorothea Smartt * Fred D’Aguiar * Linton Kwesi Johnson * Bernardine Evaristo * Roi Kwabena * John Lyons * Lemn Sissay * Grace Nichols * Jack Mapanje * Daljit Nagra * John Agard * Gemma Weekes * Wangui Wa Goro and many more...

The word has gone out that Seduce is dead, and the mourners gather on Church Island in the Caribbean for her wake. All bring their own memories of Seduce: her daughter Glory prays for the rescue of her mother's soul, but there are also those who have come to make sure that "dutty filthy woman" has finally ceased to be a temptress to the island's husbands. Her grandchildren, too, both in their different ways marked by growing up in such a conflicted family, strive to find something positive in Seduce's life, and new directions in their own. And then there is Seduce's old lover, Mikey, come to make his peace.

In this remarkable debut novel, told in patois prose that is poetic and delicate, profane and slyly funny, Desiree Reynolds has powerful things to say about race, class and the struggle between the sexes.

Desiree Reynolds started her writing career in London as a freelance journalist for the Jamaica Gleaner and the Village Voice. She has gone on to write film scripts, poetry and short stories; Seduce is her first novel. A teacher, broadcaster and DJ, Desiree currently lives in Sheffield.