Edouard Glissant

Betsy Wing

Poems by the noted Caribbean writer & philosopher that reflect the search for identity & the struggle between memory & forgetting. Poet, playwright, novelist & essayist Edouard Glissant, born in Martinique in 1928 is one of the most important contemporary writers in French. Black Salt collects two decades of Glissant's poetry & makes it available for the first time in English. It is a poetry that is aesthetically distinguished & historically significant, characterized by potent metaphors of local identity. Published in France as Le Sel Noir, the volume brings together in English translation three separate poetry collections from Glissant's early years, Le Sang Rive, Le Sel Noir, & Boises. Read together, these three works embody Glissant's project to develop a Caribbean literature no longer contained by European language. He incorporates conventions of orality & ties the poems concretely to a Martiniquan experience of history & geography/geology, expressing an ongoing search for identity in a struggle between memory & forgetting. From Riveted Blood through Black Salt to Yokes, Glissant can be seen to be developing a poetic instrument that is increasingly stark & increasingly particularized as it undergoes inflections that derive from oral & Creole sources & simultaneously opens to the local landscape, the traditional culture, & the history of Martinique.

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