Earl Lovelace

This stunning new collection draws together little known, but highly important poems written by Earl Lovelace in his early career, from the period between 1956 and 1966. Readers will delight in Lovelace's acute sense of poetry's rhythms, and his poet's capacity to produce stunning visual/aural images. Edited and compiled by Mario Laarmann.

In Trinidad, in the wake of 1970's Black Power rebellion, we follow Sonnyboy, Singer King Kala, and their town's folk through experiments in music, politics, religion, and love?and in their day-to-day adventures. Humorous and serious, sad and uplifting, Is Just a Movie, is a radiant novel about small moments of magic in ordinary life. Earl Lovelace's books include While Gods Are Falling, winner of the BP Independence Award; the Caribbean classic The Dragon Can't Dance; and Salt, which won the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize. For Is Just a Movie, he has won the Grand Prize for Caribbean Literature by the Regional Council of Guadeloupe and the 2012 OCMBocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

Walter Castle is festering with dissatisfactions in the Laventille slum in Port of Spain. As the prospect of promotion recedes and the threat of crime and lawless and rootless youth become ever more insupportable, he begins to think of going back to the village community he grew up in. But as Lovelace shows in a series of flashbacks, the force of nostalgia is not supported by actual memory, though Walter constantly tries to deceive himself that it is. Set in a 'present' of 1956 when political change was coming to Trinidad, once Walter abandons the dream of return, he is forced to choose between becoming one of the drones who passes through life without making any mark on it, or standing up for himself in a way that only makes sense if he is engaged with others. When this, Earl Lovelace's first and politically most explicit novel, was first published in 1965, it could be seen as an astringent critique of the top-down authoritarianism of nationalist politics. Its emphasis on a world where decent people like Walter Castle feel that crime and violence is destroying the social body appears, 45 years later, to be uncomfortably contemporary. Earl Lovelace was born in 13 July 1935. He is a Trinidadian novelist, journalist, playwright, and short story writer.

One hundred years after Emancipation, the diverse people of Trinidad--African, Asian, and European--have not settled into the New World. In Salt, an unforgettable cast of men and women strive with wit and passion to make sense of life in an evolving homeland.

Carnival takes on social and political importance in this recognized classic. The people of the shantytown Calvary Hill, usually invisible to the rest of society, join the throng and flaunt their neighborhood personas in masquerade during Carnival. Aldrick, the dashing "king of the Hill," becomes a glorious, dancing dragon; his lovely Sylvia, a princess; Fisheye, rebel idealist, a fierce steel band contestant; and Philo, Calypso songwriter, a star. Then a business sponsors Fisheye's band, Philo gets a hit song, and Sylvia leaves the Hill with a prosperous older man. For Aldrick, it will take one more masquerade--this time, involving guns and hostages--before the illusion of power becomes reality.

'Each word is a revelation.' The Times 'Earl Lovelace is the real stuff, a proper writer.' James Kelman In the sleepy village of Kumuca, Trinidad, change happens slowly. Yet to move with the times and expand the horizons of the villagers, the elders elect to build a school and bring in a schoolmaster with great celebration. The warnings of a local priest - that the quest for education will bring more to the village than they expect - are ignored. But the villagers will learn, all too cruelly, that progress can mean the destruction of what they know and love.

Winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize'An amazingly vivid and joyful novel.' The Times'Vital, life-enhancing.' Time OutAlford, the youngest son of a poor farm worker, has risen above his class to become a schoolteacher. He, like many young people in Trinidad, dreams of heading to England for a better life. Idealistic and determined, Alford travels to the capital to campaign for his community and, suddenly a local hero, it seems anything is possible. Or is it? Salt tells the story of a country through an unforgettable cast of characters, striving with wit and passion to make sense of life in an evolving homeland.

A story of shanty-town life in Trinidad. Calvary Hill is the home of Aldrick Prospect, who lives for the carnival and his once-a-year chance to play dragon. Here too live Miss Cleothilda, the ageing carnival queen, Philo the Calypsonian, and Fisheye, who flaunts his strength in the steel bands.

With Black Plays, Yvonne Brewster clearly demonstrated the need for a regular anthology to record the vitality of Black playwriting. For her second volume she has selected The Dragon Can't Dance, adapted from a novel by Earl Lovelace in which the inhabitants of Port of Spain, Trinidad, prepare to live out their dreams on Carnival Night; Winsome Pinnock's A Rock in Water, an energetic chronicle play about activist Claudia Jones, one of the founders of the Notting Hill Carnival; Blood, Sweat and Fears by Maria Oshodi which focuses on the problems of the ten per cent of Britain's black population who suffer from sickle cell anaemia and Job Rocking by Rastafarian poet Benjamin Zephaniah, a 'dub' opera set in and around a new style job club designed to sell the idea of work to the unemployed.