Caribbean Blues and Love's Genealogy

In this new collection of poetry, Kuwabong shows a maturity of voice and a larger poetic vision to celebrate love--love for the people of the Caribbean and love between lovers. In the first part of this collection the love that is celebrated emerges from a deep sense of historical reconnection with the poet's African ancestors who were taken captive and sent to the Caribbean. But the focus is not on the brutality of their enslavement, though that is the guiding principle that informs the poetic voice. The poems perform a retrospective search for the roots that his African ancestors planted in the new world without romanticizing their struggles, defeats, and victories. Thus they recreate the continental African as a seeker of a poetic understanding of the African Diaspora in the Caribbean. In the second part, Kuwabong takes the reader through a Prufrockian maze of relationships complicated by expectations and disappointments. The city of Hamilton, Ontario especially provides the social and physical landscapes that initiate the personae's responses to love made tricky by the extreme challenges of the mundane. Though the poems silently scream with pain and disappointment, these moods are calmed by epiphanies of extreme tenderness that bind the relationships.