Kwame Dawes

Back | Genres | Bibliography | Prizes and awards | Critical perspective
Contact details | Related links | Printer-friendly version

	Photo: © Renaissance One

Biography

Kwame Dawes was born in Ghana on 28 July 1962. He grew up in Jamaica and was educated at Jamaica College, the University of the West Indies and the University of New Brunswick, where he gained his Ph.D. He is currently Professor of English and Director of the S. C. Poetry Initiative at the University of South Carolina, where he has taught since 1992, and where he served for several years as Director of the MFA Writing Programme in Creative Writing. A reviewer, broadcaster, actor, storyteller, broadcaster, critic, poet and playwright, his play One Love (2001), an adaptation of Roger Mais' novel Brotherman, was commissioned by Talawa, one of Britain's leading black theatre companies, and premiered at the Lyric Theatre in London in 2001.

His poetry collections include Progeny of Air (1994), winner of the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, Prophets (1995), Jacko Jacobus (1995), Requiem (1996), Shook Foil: A Collection of Reggae Poetry (1997), and Map-Maker (2000). His New and Selected Poems, 1994-2002 was published in 2002. He has also published a  book of short stories, A Place to Hide and Other Stories (2002), and the first full-length study of the lyrics of Bob Marley - Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius (2002). He reviews and writes articles widely for newspapers and journals including the Washington Post, Wasafiri, the London Review of Books and World Literature Today, and is currently Criticism Editor for Obsidian II, an African-American literary journal, and author of a regular poetry column with the State newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina. He also writes poems and stories for children, which have appeared in various anthologies.

Kwame Dawes was Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa in 1986 and was made Associate Fellow at the Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick, in 1996. In the same year he won an Individual Artist Fellowship from the South Carolina Arts Commission. His book of poems, Midland (2000), draws deeply on personal travels and experiences in Africa, the Caribbean, Britain and the American South, and won the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize from Ohio University Press. His other awards include a Poetry Business Prize (2000) and a Pushcart Prize for Poetry (2001). He was John Henrik Clarke Distinguished Lecturer in Autumn 2001 at the University of Alabama where he delivered a lecture entitled Natural Mysticism: Towards a New Reggae Aesthetic. He is currently the series editor of a new series of Caribbean plays and of Sweet Sop books, a Black British Poetry series, both by Peepal Tree Press.

Kwame Dawes lives in the United States. He is married with three children. His most recent books are Gomer's Song (2008) and She's Gone (2008).

Top of page

Genres (in alphabetical order)

Drama, Fiction, Non-fiction, Poetry, Short stories

Bibliography

Progeny of Air   Peepal Tree Press, 1994

Jacko Jacobus   Peepal Tree Press, 1995

Prophets   Peepal Tree Press, 1995

Resisting the Anomie   Goose Lane Editions (Canada), 1995

Requiem   Peepal Tree Press, 1996

Shook Foil: A Collection of Reggae Poetry   Peepal Tree Press, 1997

Natural Mysticism: Towards a New Reggae Aesthetic   Peepal Tree Press, 1998

Talk Yuh Talk: Interviews with Caribbean Poets   University of Virginia Press, 1998

Wheel and Come Again: An Anthology of Reggae Poetry   (editor)   Peepal Tree Press, 1998

Map-Maker   Smith/Doorstop, 2000

Midland   Ohio University Press (US), 2000

One Love   Methuen, 2001

A Place to Hide and Other Stories   Peepal Tree Press, 2002

Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius   Sanctuary Publishing, 2002

New and Selected Poems, 1994-2002   Peepal Tree Press, 2002

I Saw Your Face   (illustrated by Tom Feelings)   Dial Books, 2005

Twenty: South Carolina Poetry Fellows   (editor)   Hub City Press, 2005

Wisteria: Twilight Songs from the Swamp Country   Red Hen Press (US), 2006

A Far Cry from Plymouth Rock   Peepal Tree Press, 2007

Impossible Flying   Peepal Tree Press, 2007

Gomer's Song (Black Goat)   Akashic Books, 2008

She's Gone   Macmillan Caribbean, 2008

Read about books by Kwame Dawes at encompassculture.com - the British Council's book database and global online book club

Buy books by Kwame Dawes at Amazon.co.uk

Top of page

Prizes and awards

1994   Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection)   Progeny of Air

1996   Individual Artist Fellowship   (South Carolina Arts Commission)

2000   Hollis Summers Poetry Prize   (Ohio University Press)   Midland

2000   Poetry Business Prize   Map-Maker

2001   Pushcart Prize for Poetry (USA)

2003   Commonwealth Writers Prize (Caribbean and Canada Region, Best First Book)   (shortlist)   A Place to Hide and Other Stories

Top of page

Critical Perspective

Kwame Dawes is the model of the post-colonialist poet. He was born in Ghana, grew up in Kingston, Jamaica and now teaches at the University of South Carolina, whist making numerous trips abroad to teach and read his poetry. He is published by the enterprising small press, Peepal Tree, based in Leeds, and he often comes to Britain.

Despite Dawes's global wanderings his seminal influence was growing up in the Caribbean. Many of his most evocative poems are set there and reggae music, which he plays in a band, was deeply formative. Coming to Jamaica from Ghana as a child he learned to speak Jamaican patois. In 2002 he wrote a study of reggae's greatest figure, Bob Marley (Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius) and his 1997 collection, Shook Foil, is subtitled 'A Collection of Reggae Poetry'. He has also edited Talk Yuh Talk: Interviews with Caribbean Poets (2001) which makes clear his allegiance to that tradition.

Dawes is an extremely prolific writer and he often revisits themes time and again to get to their essence. Shook Foil has a series of fifteen 'Tentative Definitions' in which he tries to pin down the appeal and power of reggae. Writing about music is notoriously difficult but Dawes's insistent probing does get to the heart of this music that is much more than just music to Jamaicans.

'This is the promise reggae
thrives on, the promise
that suddenly so, without rhyme,
without reason, the body
a go merge with the groan
of a circular bass-line, booming
and the rest will be the magic
of doing impossible things,
never the same again.'

In his book on Bob Marley, he says of reggae: 'The sound filled out lives. It was never approved of in the 1970s. It was never the mark of high culture but it was ubiquitous.'

Throughout his work, Dawes's description is lush, at time reminiscent of Derek Walcott but in Dawes's work the sexualization of the non-human is a strong factor. For example in Progeny of Air (1994) his first book, which won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, the title poem has:

'The propellers undress the sea;
the patterns of foam like a broken zip
opening where the bow cuts the wave.'

That first book revisits key times of his life and is much concerned with rites of passage - bullying at school, first sex, even first ejaculation:

'i smile at the seed
brimful of light
spilled in this security
of trees under the all-
seeing eye of a
three o'clock sky.'
               ('Newcomer')

Linda France, reviewing Progeny of Air in Poetry Review (Vol 84 No 4 1994/5) said of his style:

'His vocabulary is a curious mixture of formal precise or prosaic words together with street slang and surprising compounds, all informed by a love of traditional "English" poetry instilled at school in Jamaica.'

Prophets (1995), his second collection is a novel in verse and shows the influence of Derek Walcott's Omeros, even down to the three-line stanzas. A tale of hell-fire preaching, sin and the howl that rises from the ghetto, it is a strongly sustained work. Jamaica is presented, despite its sensuous lushness, as a dystopia:

'Infidels skank to the visionless platform
of sweet-mouthed politricksters looking for a contract

For their twilight years on the stump.'

Once again, the description is highly sexualized:

'Newark's phallic white towers,
spewing their toxic sperm into the fertile sky.'

The sense of sin is deeply biblical:

'This Nineveh, tucked from the hurricane's blast,

riding the harmatan and lapped by the Atlantic  turned foul
with the ruthless spirits of abandoned slaves.'

And the hucksterism that can pervert holy-roller preaching is deftly caught:

'The gospel is a three-card monte, crown and anchor board,
and the preacherman's hype is rapid fire and sweat.'

Remarkably, Dawes published another epic verse novel in the same year as Prophets: Jacko Jacobus (1995). Jacobus is another prophet and the story is a reworking of the myth of Jacob and Esau.

Requiem (1996) is a commemoration of slavery inspired by the book, The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo, by the American artist Tom Feeling. Dawes is a man who could travel freely from Ghana to Jamaica and he remembers those who were forced to make the same journey:

'My brother, I have no words
to repeat the howl of the crippled land
at the amputation of a limb ... '

Dawes is one of the most energetic writers on the scene today, tireless as a teacher as well as a performer and writer. In the introduction to an American collection, Resisting the Anomie (1995) he said: 'I have learned this habit of taking credit for serendipity from our great "discoverer" Christopher Columbus.' Which is another way of saying that he has turned most of the circumstances of his life into poetry whilst never forgetting the primal wound of the Caribbean.

Peter Forbes, 2003

Top of page

Contact information

Publisher (General enquiries) Peepal Tree Press 17 Kings Avenue Leeds  LS6 1QS England Tel: +44 (0)113 245 1703 E-mail: contact@peepaltreepress.com http://www.peepaltreepress.com

Agent William Morris Agency (UK) 52/53 Poland Street London  W1F 7LX England Tel: +44 (0)20 7534 6800 Fax: +44 (0)20 7534 6900

Top of page

Related links

www.kwamedawes.com

Top of page