Book Review: Star Apple Blue and Avocado Green by Paulette A. Ramsay

Abstract

Ramsay's poems, in this, her most recent collection of poetry, much like seeds germinate with satiric and feminist fingers, individual hands that celebrate a national then pan Caribbean culture, one that interacts with global reality. She narrates her stories, stories with stories, stories based on stories, stories stored in trees, trees that communicate with each other, trees that talk with the voice of great ancestral spirits to bind past up with present, the old and the young, the mother and grandmothers. Amidst realities hard to negotiate, her colours green and blue signal laughter and life, a signal of hope she finds in the language of poetry, one that lies, in Bakhtinian terms, on the borderline between oneself and the other, and whose word is always half someone else's.