Throughout Wordplanting is a vivid, searching intellect, linked to the wandering ethos of the poet at work (akin to Robert Hayden’s “austere and lonely offices”) but with the proverbial soul of a people—whom the poet claims as kin—in its sight. Through what can be read as a rejection of the ferocity of modernity and its reductive notions of progress, Wordplanting is preoccupied with a reclamation of social and personal sovereignty in an understated yet troubled Caribbeanist consciousness