Ground Level

In 2011 the Government of Trinidad and Tobago declared a state of emergency to counter the violent crime associated with the drugs trade. Ground Level confronts the roots of the madness and chaos seething under the surface of this “crude season of curfew from ourselves” when the state becomes a jail. In this dread season, author Jennifer Rahim finds hope and consolation in the word and in those places where it is possible to find salvation in “this landscape of ever-opening doorways,” such as Grand Riviere, the subject of a long, 12-part reflection on the values that can still be found in rural Trinidad. Elsewhere she engages in dialogue with those writers who confronted the Janus face of Caribbean creativity and nihilism, writers such as Earl Lovelace, Eric Roach, Victor Questel, Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwait,e and Martin Carter. This is an ambitious collection that speaks in both a prophetic and a literary, intertextual voice, which combines the personal and the public in mutually enriching ways; it shows the assurance of a poet who has constantly worked at her craft, but who also takes formal risks to capture the reality of desperate times.

Jennifer Rahim is a senior lecturer in literature at the University of the West Indies–St. Augustine, Trinidad, and Tobago. She is the author of three poetry collections and a short story collection, and her articles on Caribbean literature have appeared in numerous places.