When the guitars tickle a bedrock of drum and bass, when the girl a
shock out and a steady hand curve round her sweat-smooth waist, when the
smell of Charlie mingles with the chemicals of her hair and the groove
is of the sweetest friction - how is a young man to keep his way pure?
Kwame Dawes's poetry rises to new heights in these psalms of confession
and celebrations of reggae's power to prophesy, to seek after
righteousness and seduce the body and mind. Here is poetry walking the
bassline, which darts sweetly around the rigid lick of the rhythm guitar
yet expresses all the sadness and alienation at the heart of reggae.
This, for Dawes, is the earth which 'never tells me my true home' and
where behind every chekeh of the guitar there is the ancestral memory of
the whip's crack. Shook Foil dramatises the conflict between the
purity of essences and the taints of the actual, not least in the poems
which focus on Bob Marley's life. Here is the rhygin, word-weaving
prophet and the philanderer with the desperate hunger for yard pumpum,
the revealer of truths and the buffalo soldier who has married yard with
show biz affluence. Above all there is the intense sadness of Marley's
death, for how can one live without the duppy conqueror's defiant wail
in an island gone dark for the passing of his song?
But for Shook Foil there is always the gospeller's hope that the dead
will rise from dub ruins and patch a new quilt of sound for the feet to
prance on. And when the high hat shimmering and the bass drum thumping,
what else to do but dance?
"Throughout the collection, Dawes captures the many dimensions of reggae
from the psalmic to the prophetic that are yet to be explored by other
writers and musicians. Reggae remains unparalleled in its ability to
absorb other influences and remain true to itself and to capture beauty,
pain, and pleasure in a one-drop riddim. Its syncopation suggests a
break, a gap - somewhere to fall with the faith that you will be
caught - and this is what gives reggae its redemptive value. To really
enjoy the music, you must believe. The same could be said of Shook
Foil."
Geoffrey Philp, The Caribbean Writer.
Kwame Dawes is widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of
the post-Walcott generation. He currently holds the position of
Distinguished Poet In Residence and Louise Fry Scudder Professor of
Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina.
