Connecting Medium
Connecting Medium links the past to the present, the Caribbean to England, mothers to fathers. Here are poems about identity and culture, generations and the future. A powerful sequence of poems about a black Medusa. Poems that link the material world to the spiritual one. Poems that recreate a sixties childhood in South London in vivid detail. Connecting Medium is full of energy and life. Hers is a bright, passionate voice.' - Jackie Kay
£7.99
Author(s)
Dorothea Smartt
ISBN number
9781900715508
Pages
72
Price
£7.99
Classification
Poetry
Country setting
United Kingdom
Barbados
Publication date
01 Sep 2001

'As Caribbean Woman move into the oras of their own consciousness, wonderful new icons emerge to join Gort, Tacky, Zumbi, TL, Galahad & the Midnight Robber - Tia, Fola, Harriet’s Daughter, Sister Stark and the Mary’s: Prince, Seacole, Wiggins, Wages, Yellow Mary, MaryAnn of the Shifting Sand, GypsyMary and Mariana Grajales, to welcome a few.

Now for the first time we havin a Dread Mary. The Black Medusa of this new voice in Caribbean poetry, this Brit born Bajan international, is Dorothea Smartt, who will tangle you up & burn you to stone

Here she is
standing ready
to rip to claw to beat
you to your monster self.
Narrow the focus
block the light.
In your own tall shadow
crouch quiver whimper.
Let your hair grow long. Rage
down to skin and bone. Rage
red-hot-blue-cold
tearing you. Solitary in the dark.

And that’s only page 65' - Kamau Brathwaite

Dorothea Smartt, born and raised in London, is of Barbadian heritage. Described as ‘accessible and dynamic’, her poetry appears in several journals and ground-breaking anthologies."

Dorothea Smartt

Dorothea Smartt has an international reputation as a respected literary activist, live artist, and established poet. Born and raised in London, with Barbadian heritage, she is described as a 'Brit-born Bajan international’. Over the past twenty years, her credits include engagements with the British Council in Bahrain, South Africa, USA, Egypt, and Hungary. She was keynote speaker at Barbados’ Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Award, 2013. She has two full collections, Connecting Medium and Ship Shape [Peepal Tree Press]. Her recent chapbook, Reader, I Married Him & Other Queer Goings-On, “…is subversive, radical, and surprisingly panoramic...” She is currently researching a live art work, including a third full poetry collection. In it she continues to rework standard narratives, this time imagining same-sex relationships and cross-gender experiences among ‘West Indian’ workers on the Panama Canal in the early 1900’s.
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