Wheel and Come Again: An Anthology of Reggae Poetry - Softcover

Wheel and Come Again is a dancehall session in poetry, taking readers into the heart of reggae, into the seduction of the drum and bass. The poems are not reggae songs without music, not dub poems intended for performance with a band, but poems mixing all the resources of language with the reggae mood, the reggae intelligence and the reggae aesthetic.

Featuring poems by almost 40 writers of Caribbean origin, Wheel and Come Again ignites poetic convention with the compelling spirit of reggae. Among the contributors are Canadian poets such as Rachel Manley, Afua Cooper, Lillian Allen, and Olive Senior; UK poets including John Agard, Jean Binta Breeze, and Linton Kwesi Johnson; US writers Opal Palmer Adisa, Fred d'Aguiar, and others; and Island poets such as Edward Baugh, Kamau Brathwaite, and Lorna Goodison.

Kwame Dawes is truly a poet with an international voice and a burgeoning international reputation. Dawes was born in Ghana of Jamaican parents and grew up in Jamaica. He spent time as a child in England, and later studied and taught at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. He is the founder and lead singer of Ujaama, a reggae band that reunited in 2000 to open the Harvest Jazz and Blues Festival in Fredericton. Now a professor of post-colonial literature at the University of South Carolina, Dawes is a frequent presence on the Canadian cultural scene as a consultant on race relations and the arts, and as a commentator on CBC Radio. Dawes's first collection of poetry, Progeny of Air, won England's Forward Poetry Prize in 1994. Since then, he has published five collections, including the widely praised Resisting the Anomie. Kwame Dawes is also the editor of Talk Yuh Talk, a collection of interviews with Caribbean poets, and Wheel and Come Again, the landmark anthology of reggae poetry.