A Mural by the Sea

Poetry and masquerade have always resided in me. I know them to be inspired, and when well rendered, magical. From San Fernando to Brooklyn, poetry is the Carnival, and the Trinidad Carnival finds its way into my poetry?¬as visual and oral experience'everyday living, a painted face J'ouvert morning. Many of the poems in this volume have aged with me and over that time, and again like my own life, been transformed into some measure of sustained lucidity. The heart of these poems speaks...
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Poetry and masquerade have always resided in me. I know them to be inspired, and when well rendered, magical. From San Fernando to Brooklyn, poetry is the Carnival, and the Trinidad Carnival finds its way into my poetry?¬as visual and oral experience'everyday living, a painted face J'ouvert morning. Many of the poems in this volume have aged with me and over that time, and again like my own life, been transformed into some measure of sustained lucidity. The heart of these poems speaks to ordinary men and women and the world about them. From this landscape, language and experience comes A Mural by the Sea. ?In A Mural by the Sea, and after a long wait, Dawad Philip has presented us with a brilliant work infused with an imagery that is vivid and intense. His poems are like Impressionist paintings, with delicate yet deliberate brush strokes'image laden and alliterative'touching deeper parts of the soul and psyche. His voice is authentic, trustworthy, rooted in the soil and hardscrabble streets of his native Trinidad, and Brooklyn where he lived for nearly four decades. Philip embraces the richness and complexities of Caribbean life and culture without being sentimental nor duplicitous. His poems are a feast for the senses, a large and grand poetic mural that reaches beyond ?the steel margins? of our lives and our mortality.' ?Geoffrey Dunn