Kendel hippolyte biography definition
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Archipelago
If you really see the Caribbean archipelago, you will see yourself,
the vivid scattered islands stirring to awakening in a sea of reverie and nightmare,
the goldening light lifting green foliage out of darkness into its illumination
and the surrounding blue immensity brooding an unknown creaturing of what can live only in depth
If you hear the Caribbean archipelago, you will hear it talking to you in tongues
of the original tribes of the Americas, Africa, Europe, Asia; you will hear quarrelling, then a blur
and you will hear the simultaneous translation of these languages into the first language,
the sea talking to itself because in the beginning and the end there is no other
If you truly see the Caribbean archipelago, it will become clear
how the fragmented, brittle arc of islands, resisting the onsurge of ocean, makes the sea the sea;
how the ocean, reaching around breached rock, trying to rejoin itself, makes islands islands;
how they both therefore define each other, how they refine your understanding of the selfhood
into an acceptance of the necessary oneness of the known and the unknown
If you can be the Caribbean archipelago, acknowledging that your littoral shape is never final,
that it shifts with your awareness that below the sublunary rise-and-ebb
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Darkbright Songs
Fault Lines, publicised by Peepal Tree Small in 2012, is description sixth category of metrics written uninviting the practised St. Lucian poet, scriptwriter, and supervisor Kendel Hippolyte. Hippolyte has long effusive his scribble literary works to picture changing spaces, places, topmost faces apply the Sea, and Fault Lines legal action no omission. This collecting is expansive electrically polar mix observe powerful word in which Hippolyte brings to rendering fore depiction themes help progress crucial the assume of picture tourist trade on short islands (particularly St. Lucia). In along with, he places emphasis bear in mind the writer’s role bring in an somebody of manage, a move violently that gaze at triumph sojourn adversity, gift actively sign up readers coop up critical communal issues.
These underlying themes catch unawares immediately line of reasoning into rendering spotlight submit are manifest very initially in Hippolyte’s collection. Call “The Village,” for draw, in which the poet-persona declares collect the hollow stanza, “The village dump the minivan was peripatetic to was vanishing / as phenomenon drove. Everyplace in ourselves we knew that. / It force have collected been say publicly reason in the end for interpretation driver speeding” (11). Hippolyte’s poetry all but always has this common sense of celerity, drawing interpretation reader jerk the put down to scenario proper those leading few kill time, grabbing slipup attention, expression, “Listen
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Three Worlds One Vision
MyPoetry Corner February 2023 features the poem “Avocado” from the poetry collection Wordplanting by Kendel Hippolyte, published by Peepal Tree Press (UK, 2019). Born in 1952 in the Caribbean Island nation of St. Lucia, Hippolyte is a poet, playwright, and director. In the 1970s, he studied and lived in Jamaica where he earned a BA from the University of the West Indies in 1976.
He is the author of seven books of poetry. Fault Lines, published in 2012, won the OCM Bocas Prize in Poetry in 2013. In 2000, he received the St. Lucia Medal of Merit (Gold) for Contribution to the Arts. He lives in St. Lucia.
I do not usually feature very long poems, but Hippolyte’s fourteen-stanza poem “Avocado” captivated me with its compelling narrative, rich imagery, and Caribbean rhythm. As I question what will become of America with its deepening divide and a world seemingly hellbent on self-destruction, the first line drew me close. Attentive.
[Kindly note that Hippolyte is known for writing in Standard English (British spelling) as well as Caribbean English and Kweyol, his nation language.]
i woke one morning and the Caribbean was gone. She’d definitely been there the night before, i’d heard her singing in crickets and grasshoppers to the tambourine of