Peepal Tree Press Ltd

A stunning and deeply felt third collection from Donna Aza Weir Soley, this book journeys through the tangled territories of love, loss, forgiveness, resilience, and redemption. With her signature blend of lyrical precision and spiritual insight, Weir Soley traces the ways the heart breaks, mends, and learns to beat again. These poems move between the intimate and the ancestral, confronting wounds both personal and inherited, and finding in each a possibility for transformation. Fierce, tender, and unflinchingly honest, this collection invites readers to witness the courage it takes to return to oneself—and the grace that emerges when we do.

In an extraordinary late flowering, these new poems — written in his nineties — are still characteristically and unmistakeably the crafted work of Ian McDonald, and they are also remarkably other.McDonald’s hallmark qualities are all still here: a capacity for genuine compassion; an exploration of the complex nature of love; a profound engagement with the natural world; and character vignettes, powerfully drawn, empathetic but never sentimental, that are an essential archive of a disappearing Guyana. These late poems bring new angles on McDonald’s perennial themes. There is the exploration of memory and intimations of mortality, a focus on grandchildren, the garden and the sheer wonder of being alive at the poet’s great age. But in addition, there is something new-minted and unrestrained about the language of these later poems that is remarkable. These poems are, if anything, even more surprising, moving and inspirational than those pieces beloved by generations of Caribbean readers. There is a kind of carefree truthfulness about the poems in The Impossibility of Nothingness. Richly imagistic, the poems feel elemental, written without the constraint of wanting approval or applause but because they demanded to be written. As he says in the final line of the short title poem – which is an assertion of the possibility of momentary joy in even the bleakest of situations – “I record this just in case it’s true”.

Written by the New York Times, on publication of Die the Long Day:Institutions, in West Indian society, were created by slavery and colonialism, for a small elite. When a new Elite, however, began to emerge, the peasant majority began to understand their former white rulers through the black imitators who succeeded them. The peasant at this stage also recognized that the institutions sustaining the black elite were even more vulnerable than the ones that had upheld the white one; that these borrowed institutions could be co-opted, transformed and finally destroyed if necessary. A mass demonstration, an election or a coup d''etat can topple one ruling element and bring another into being. It is not that the people are unstable so much as the institutions they inherited.Orlando Patterson in “Die the Long Day,” a novel set on a Jamaican sugar plantation in the 18th century, throws new light on this unstable situation and on the subtleties of the master-slave relationship. In so doing, he gives a better understanding of contemporary West Indian society. For it is as if this society is bent on proving that those who ignore the past will be forced to relive it; as if the passing of two centuries has only deepened the conflicts, by presenting them over and over again in different guises.The novel begins with a muted, sensuous description of the landscape around the plant-, tion, and then Quasheba, a slave appears. She is running for her life. She had tried to prevent her daughter Polly from being hired out to a plantation owner. “Don''t make him touch you,” she had warned, “even if you have to kill ‘im.... Make then do what they want after. You will be just as good as dead if ‘im touch you anyway.” The owner was known to have syphilis, and Quasheba “dreaded the disease.... for her own mother had died of it and she had to look after her during her last days.”

"Few contemporary poetry books begin with such unabashedly epic, rhapsodic, prophetic a voice as Shara McCallum’s Behold. From here the journey takes us through Jamaica of the poet’s childhood to ways of perceiving the interior—in museums, galleries, art studios of the world. This formally inventive book is a singing in defense of deeper contemplation. Having seen the “surreal landscape of history’s graveyard” and understood “what it means to be a refugee in one’s own country” the poet gives us wisdom. Through McCallum’s clarity of perspective, her musical, memorable clarity, the soul stands apart, sees and is seen. With unrelenting honesty, here is a book that proposes we take a step back from the shallowness of our age and open our eyes—as the many painters and landscapes the poet finds herself in front of do—to behold the world that is ours. Behold. Behold. This is a beautiful, soul-making book."—Ilya Kaminsky

John Kinsella -- vegan, anarchist, activist pacifist, and poet -- threads together what the powerful prefer to keep apart.With fierce lyricism and intellectual clarity, Kinsella confronts the entangled violences of empire, colonialism, and contemporary global capitalism: personal experiences as an Australian descendant of settlers on indigenous Noongar land, responses to world traumas such as the genocidal war on Gaza, racist and xenophobic hostility to refugees and economic migrants, patriarchal power at social, familial and literary levels, homophobia, the trade in futures as an ‘investment in distress’, the profiteering of arms manufacturers, use of toxic pesticides and industrialised farming, carbon capitalism and global warming, monarchical pretensions, destructive social inequalities, exploitative relations between humans and animals, species extinctions, and much more.But this is never other than a collection of poems, and Kinsella is deeply conscious that poets have been, and are, as capable of becoming voices for the powerful as anyone else (and for the powerful to use art as a disguise), and the collection is enriched by his questioning dialogues with poets from Virgil to Thomas Hardy.

Concrete Dreams tells the gripping story of Lucas Bostock, a Jamaican immigrant who arrives in 1950s London determined to succeed — and to impose his vision of success on his family. A harsh, domineering man, shaped and scarred by survival, Lucas is no one’s idea of a nice man. When his wife Rhoda finally leaves him, taking their only daughter, he’s left to raise their three sons with a mix of toughness, pride, and unrelenting ambition.Lucas believes that hard work — on building sites, as a carpenter, and eventually as a landlord — is the only way to protect his family. But as his children grow up and take their own paths through boxing, journalism, politics, retail, and religion, they are forced to reckon with the cost of their father’s influence. Meanwhile, the tenants in his houses add further layers to this vivid portrait of Caribbean-British life, sharing their stories of resistance and renewal in a changing city.Dennis crafts Lucas with remarkable honesty — flawed, often unlikeable, but deeply human. Concrete Dreams is both an intimate family saga and a bold exploration of race, masculinity, and generational legacy. It’s a Windrush story, but one that refuses easy narratives, capturing instead the full complexity of Caribbean London and the voices that shaped it—and a narrator determined to tell his own.

This outstanding second collection explores the lives of errant women and creatures who refuse to adhere to official paths, and the liminal, boundary-crossing wildscapes of the land and heart.These tender, lyrical, daring poems learn from the natural world, through immersion and observation, to find new ways to reflect and adapt, as they celebrate the ways our beings and bodies are inextricably entangled with the ever-changing landscapes and heartscapes of the dark woods, glittering rivers, windswept moors and towering mountains.

White British couple Hugh and Julia Pennington buy an old church to convert on a former cocoa plantation on a Caribbean island. When their estate agent fails to meet them at the airport, they accept a lift in a large American car from a charismatic local, Horatio. The couple are to become increasingly dependent on Horatio who ends up moving into their ‘servants’ quarters’ but remains an enigma.Hugh and Julia want to ‘get involved’ in the life of their adopted island home. But they little suspect how much the past horrors of slavery, and their best intentions, will impact their lives.This tense psychological drama examines the delicate master-servant relationship against a Caribbean island''s colonial background and a still simmering history of slavery. An intimate portrait of a marriage, the novel also explores the difficulties of human communication and how these are compounded when race, sex and culture-bound assumptions are added to the mix.

In Wandering Spirits of Exile, poems converse with art, bridging words and visual representation. This powerful collection breathes life into images, capturing their essence and telling their stories. Through three sections, the collection reimagines the exilic journey.Section 1 interrogates and illuminates the Middle Passage. Section 2 delves into the spirit-life of Jamaica’s Nanny of the Maroons, tracing the ''Nanny Spirit'' through generations. Section 3 expands the narrative through artists like Mallica ''Kapo'' Reynolds and Jean-Michel Basquiat, portraying the enduring legacy of Africans in the New World.With ekphrastic poetry at its core, Wandering Spirits of Exile weaves history and emotion, confronting institutional violence and social disenfranchisement. The Nanny spirit, a symbol of empowerment, guides readers through a journey of reclamation and resilience. This collection is a tribute to heritage, identity, and the uncontainable spirit of those far from home.

This powerful novel in stories follows its young narrator, growing up in a divided family. Shifting between Trinidad, England, and Ireland, she must learn to make sense of herself, and take her place in a world full of contradictions, cruelty and temptation. Look At You grabs the attention elegantly, with sharp dialogue, acuteness of observation, and the joy of meeting complex characters. The frank and engaging narrator, recognising the independent otherness of the people she writes about, has an alert eye for moments of epiphany, absurdity, sadness and comedy.''Amanda Smyth writes like a descendant of Jean Rhys...a born novelist'' ALI SMITH‘Smyth’s writing is as lushly beautiful as the landscape she describes’ THE TIMES‘Like Alice Walker, Smyth vividly and empathetically re-creates gender and racial tensions’ ELLE MAGAZINE''Hypnotic and heartbreaking... this may be Amanda Smyth''s best book yet.'' PAUL MURRAY