Musings, Mazes, Muses, Margins, by Gordon Rohlehr (Leeds, U.K.: Peepal Tree Press, 2020. £13.99), is subtitled “a memoir” but it’s not like any other we (or we’d bet you) have ever read, consisting mainly of excerpts from a diary of dreams, each with a date and time, and ranging in theme [...] As this master of calypso writes of the dreams, they “are crazy rearrangements of current events, exhumed memories from early childhood, suppressed crises, real and imaginary happenings, cinematic fantasies of violence that have nurtured illusions of power, dominance and control which, despite their absurdity in the realm of ordinary everyday experience, are terrifyingly real in the interior world of shadows.” What’s not to like in this very West Indian plunge into, what Rohlehr signals as “mazes, labyrinths, corridors and shadowy places”?
