Brian Chan Fabula Rasa
anon, Caribbean Beat

Brian Chan’s first collection Thief With Leaf won the Guyana Prize six years ago; Cecil Gray is a distinguished educator who has compiled several anthologies of regional literature, and helped to pioneer the inclusion of Caribbean literature in the school curriculum - this is his first personal collection. Both poets - one a Guyanese, the other a Trinidadian - now live in Canada. Chan loves wordplay, new inflections for familiar words and phrases, shifts of meaning, puns. At times, his taut rhythms recall Martin Carter, but he has the insistent burrowing style of a more modern, metropolitan tradition.