Lady in a Boat

In poems that express an oblique and resonant disquiet (''people dream of a lady/ in a boat, dressed in red/ petticoat, adrift and weeping'') and a sequence that addresses memories of the death of the Grenadian revolution, too painful to confront until now, Merle Collins writes of a Caribbean adrift, amnesiac and in danger of nihilistic despair. But she also achieves a life-enhancing and consoling perspective on those griefs. She does this by revisiting the hopes and humanities of the people involved, recreating them in all their concrete particularity, or by speaking through the voice of an eighty-year-old woman ''making miracle/ with little money because turn hand is life lesson'', and in writing poems that celebrate love, the world of children and the splendours of Caribbean nature. Her poems take the ''new dead ancestors back to/ mountain to feed the fountain/ of dreams again.''Merle Collins is Grenadian. She is the author of two novels, a collection of short stories and two previous collections of poetry. She teaches Caribbean literature at the University of Maryland.