Volcano Verses

These poems offer vignettes of the landscapes and people of an island devastated by a volcano -- Montserrat. The vast eruption in 1997 not only devastated habitats but scattered half the population across the world and thus ruined both community and economy. The poems move between that huge event and the continuing menace and landscapes touched and untouched. The author stayed on in Montserrat. The exuberant language -- full of pun, double entendre, mixed metaphor and trawls of historic and political reference -- shows this anthology of remembrance and celebration is directed towards the readers from Montserrat itself. But at the same time it offers the outsider a vivid glimpse of the tenor of life and people there. Oddly the silence and solitude of an abandoned place don’t really suffice the poems as one might have expected. The excursions into creole in fact give a sense of a populace still there rather than scattered across the world. The importance of this collection lies largely in a vivid record of a tiny devastated place with the choice of poetic form relatively unimportant.