Ancestors

Ancestors startlingly reinvents one of the most important long poems of our hemisphere. Here in a single volume is Kamau Brathwaites long unavailable, landmark trilogyMother Poem, Sun Poem, and X/Self (1977, 1982, and 1987)now completely revised and expanded by the author. With its Video Sycorax typographic inventions and linguistic play, Ancestors liberates both the language and the new-Caliban vision of the poet. In its fresh and more experimental form the trilogy embodies the recapture (what the poet has called the intercovery) of Brathwaites African/Caribbean ancestry as a possession of power and renewal, even as it plumbs the deep tonalities of enslavement, oppression, and colonial dispossession.