Afro-Caribbean Poetry and Ritual

" Interested readers will no doubt approach this volume with the expectation of learning more about poets like Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott, and they will not be disappointed. " - Review of Texas Books

" Griffith s scholarship is remarkably thorough. In using the notion of the tidealectic as his controlling trope, the author manages to link a vast body of oral tradition - both literary and nonliterary - to the primal natural archetype of island cultures. This is perhaps best demonstrated in his fascinating analysis of the symbolic patterns embodied in the Limbo dance - the ebb and flow, the death and resurrection - which becomes a metaphor for the Middle Passage, the hell of slavery, and the eventual rise of free, post-colonial cultures. As the author says, It is this metaphorical rhythm of retrieval and advance, death and rebirth . . . that gives conceptual unity to a range of forms and styles in Caribbean residually oral art. " - R. S. Gwynn, editor of the Penguin Pocket Anthology