Ship Shape

Focusing on a sense of duty--to record family history, to envision wholeness out of fragments, and to dissolve the differences that prejudice may interpose between private and public selves--this rich collection of poetry hinges upon a sequence of poems that excavate the missing history of Samboo, an African slave brought from the Caribbean to the city of Lancaster in Lancashire, England. Drawing connections between present-day Lancaster and the foundations of its 18th-century prosperity in slave trading, the account places Samboo's tragedy in the Lancaster landscape and text that offers a deeply personal response to the bicentennial of the abolition of the British slave trade. Contemporary poems provide both a counterpoint to the emptiness of Samboo's too-soon curtailed life and echo a continuity of loss wrought by the fragmentation of Afro-Caribbean families through continuing migrations and death.