3 Review(s)

In 2011 the Government of Trinidad & Tobago declared a state of emergency to counter the violent crime associated with the drugs trade. Ground Level confronts the roots of the madness and chaos seething under the surface of this "crude season of curfew from ourselves" when the state becomes a jail. For Rahim, her country is a place "blind to what is going on, hooked on carnival and hedonism/ trivia in the press", where "No-one hears the measure of shadow in any rhythm". It is a place where the air is "made less fresh each year/as forests disappear". It is a place where "poets hurt enough to die". In this dread season, Rahim finds hope and consolation in the word and in those places where it is possible to find salvation in "this landscape of ever-opening doorways", such as Grand Riviere, the subject of a long, twelve-part reflection on the values that can still be found in rural Trinidad. Elsewhere she engages in dialogue with those writers who confronted the Janus face of Caribbean creativity and nihilism: poets such as Eric Roach, Victor Questel, Walcott, Brathwaite and Martin Carter, praying of the last "let his words drop on the conscience of a nation". To the late Jamaican poet Tony McNeill she confides that "The Ungod of things has not changed". This is an ambitious collection that speaks in both a prophetic and a highly literary, intertextual voice, which combines the personal and the public in mutually enriching ways. Rahim knows that it is "craft keeps every story true", that "language playing dead only/ to ambush change." This is Jennifer Rahim's fourth collection of poetry; it shows the assurance of a poet who has constantly worked at her craft, but who also takes formal risks to capture the reality of desperate times.