Console

The long-awaited second collection of poetry by Colin Channer, "one of the most significant literary figures in the Caribbean" (Globe and Mail).

Seeing relations of what ought to be disparate
is my living, my burden, my habit, my gift.
I left this island early, never learned to love with value
in my language, my fishes, my birds, my trees . . .

In Console, Colin Channer moves through the landscapes of the Caribbean and New England with grace, strength, and an undercurrent of thrumming music. Channer, the author of the breathtaking collection Providential, considers questions of erasure, memory, and home as the book shifts from homeland to homeland. Channer's poetry is shot through with the rhythms and methods of dub, a largely instrumental reggae genre. In parallel to the origins of dub, which began with musical structures of the West and transformed them with experimental manipulation, Channer processes and builds upon his own cultural inheritance to construct moments of joy and succor.

Written in three parts, Console's central section contains several photographs of life in New England, both archival images and contemporary photographs by Marybeth Meehan. Like these photographs, the book moves through time and space, journeying across seas and into our past. Displacement is at its heart, from individual migration to the enduring suffering of the Middle Passage. Channer traces these movements, their echoes, and the lands that ground them in this intimate and far-ranging collection of poetry.

Includes black-and-white images