A Review of Canouan Suite and Other Pieces

Paintings can sometimes speak words; poems will occasionally offer vistas. These aren’t contradictions, but conclusions that St Vincent-born, Barbados-based Philip Nanton’s new hybrid art-verse book, Canouan Suite and Other Pieces, attempts to make plain. Nanton offers poems — some rollicking, others contemplative — alongside visual pieces from artists who are either Caribbean, or closely affiliated with Caribbean spaces. These poems immerse themselves playfully and poignantly in cricket, neo-colonisation, and the bewildering, bodacious beauty of Barbados itself.

What strikes the reader reassuringly is how firmly in the local soil these poems are grown. In “Night Cricket at Carlton Club, Barbados”, “bats are twirled; leather hits wood; runs, like souls, are sometimes saved. People erupt from their seats, shout, sit down, mutter. Glove knocks glove.” Nanton compels his audience with images plucked straight from the greenery, chaos, and market-stalls of Caribbean living, whether he turns his attention to a topsy-turvy police station or a troupe of outlandishly named minibuses.

In “Canouan Suite”, for which the book is named, the poet trains a sharply critical eye on the clutches of foreign investment in a small-island community. A chorus of voices populates the poem, from the bone-weary hotel worker to the cavalier, dispassionate outsider who calls the island “a pocket-handkerchief of a place.” The poem is a powerful admonition that lets its own characters speak; it highlights Nanton’s lyrical virtuosity without dampening his message.

Canouan Suite and Other Pieces warns against the real dangers in calling any place, Caribbean or otherwise, a “paradise.” Despite this grave counsel, the book opens itself to wonder at every turn, proving that when easy labels are discarded, the deepest cistern of an island’s heart spills over.

This review first appeared in Caribbean Beat Magazine Issue 144, March/April 2017, at https://www.caribbean-beat.com/issue-144/caribbean-bookshelf-mar-apr-2017-book-reviews#ixzz5TUHgG3sY