Volcano Verses - Softcover

Howard Fergus

 
9781900715799: Volcano Verses

Synopsis

Howard Fergus is amongst a very small minority of Montserratians. He lives in Montserrat. Emigration has taken generations away and the 1997 eruption of Soufrière destroyed two-thirds of its habitable space, its economy and drove the majority of its inhabitants into exile. The poems in Volcano Verses express the confidence that island life and folk will outlast volcanic tantrums, that though 'Tonight Chances pique still grows/...But cattle low and egrets ride/ Inspite of fire from mountain tides'.

But what Fergus seems to be doing in the book is writing against the absences, writing into being again the people who have gone, the landscape utterly transformed, the society fragmented. The eruption has instigated the sternest truth-telling, the sense of a world purified, but it has also prompted a hugely heightened consciousness of the importance of the seemingly trivial, the myriad social interactions, the sounds, the smells of a literally vanished world. It is the very absences, the restriction of current possibility that drives Fergus to greater abundance of creation, in the conversational, muscular rhythms, the serious word-play that characterise his most mature and distinctive collection yet.

Sir Howard Fergus was born in Montserrat. He is the author of three previous collections of poetry: Cotton Rhymes (1976), Green Innocence (1978) and Stop the Carnival (1980).

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About the Author

Howard Fergus is a senior lecturer at the University of the West Indies. He has been Speaker of the Montserrat Legislative Council since 1974. He is the author of Montserrat: Emerald Isle of the Caribbean and the coeditor of Hugo Versus Montserrat. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Cotton Rhymes, Green Innocence, Stop the Carnival, Lara Rains and Colonial Rights, and Volcano Song.

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