In 2011 the Government of Trinidad & Tobago declared a state of emergency to counter the violent crime associated with the drugs trade. Ground Level confronts the roots of the madness and chaos seething under the surface of this “crude season of curfew from ourselves” when the state becomes a jail. For Rahim, her country is a place where “No-one hears the measure of shadow in any rhythm”, a place where “poets hurt enough to die”.
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In this dread season, Rahim finds hope and consolation in the word and in those places where it is possible to find salvation in “this landscape of ever-opening doorways”, such as Grand Riviere, the subject of a long, twelve-part reflection on the values that can still be found in rural Trinidad. Elsewhere she engages in dialogue with those writers who confronted the Janus face of Caribbean creativity and nihilism: writers such as Earl Lovelace, Eric Roach, Victor Questel, Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite and Martin Carter, praying of the last “let his words drop on the conscience of a nation”. Alluding to the late Jamaican poet Anthony McNeill, she confides that “The Ungod of things has not changed”.
This is an ambitious collection that speaks in both a prophetic and a literary, intertextual voice, which combines the personal and the public in mutually enriching ways; it shows the assurance of a poet who has constantly worked at her craft, but who also takes formal risks to capture the reality of desperate times.
Jennifer Rahim is Trinidadian. She also writes short fiction and criticism. She is currently Senior Lecturer at The Liberal Arts Department, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad.
Jennifer Rahim is an award winning Trinidadian writer of poetry, fiction and literary criticism. Her books of fiction include Curfew Chronicles: A Fiction (2017), which won the 2018 overall OCM Bocas prize for Caribbean Literature, and Songster and Other Stories (2007). She has written several poetry collections. Approaching Sabbaths (2009) was awarded a Casa de las Américas Prize in 2010. Redemption Rain: Poems was published in 2011 and Ground Level: Poems in 2014. Sanctuaries of Invention (2021) is her latest poetry collection.
