Night Vision

by Kendel Hippolyte

With his dexterity as a writer, Kendel Hippolyte speaks through and beyond tradition. He writes in sonnet, triolet, villanelle, and echo poem; in idiomatic dramatic monologues that capture the rhythms of Caribbean speech; in blues and rap poems; in free verse that draws upon the long-breath incantatory lines of Ginsberg and contracts in miniaturist forms as concise as graffiti. The rapturous linguistic energy of the poems invites us to look beyond the outward reality they contemplate to a more hopeful, if occluded, vision. It is the title poem of Kendel Hippolyte’s collection in which he lays down his ambitious challenge to himself and his reader: because we see with history, it is difficult to see through it; and yet we must or we become it—become nothing else but history. In rising to meet it, Hippolyte draws upon all his verbal mastery and critical insight to draw sharp focus upon a nation in flux, where urbanization expands and fragments his home of St. Lucia. The poet turns his vision upon the people, the land and the culture, and finds a microcosm of the Caribbean in the 21st century, reminding us of the possibilities for renewal in the personal and everyday.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 4, 2006

Reviews

[Shivanee Ramlochan · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is something ultimately so humanizing, so beautifully ordinary in its utter lack of contrivance, about one of this book's best poems being "Circle of Joy", dedicated to the poet's first drama students. The tone is familiar and familial, the address to young thespians urgent and also unmuddied by anything other than honest, full regard. You feel the poet so keenly when he tries to describe what his charges gave him, what he found himself giving in turn -- what we all hope we have in us to do, even when we're acquainted with new levels of personal emptiness:

"Something to do with just how naturally you took for granted
that the work must be done well, something about how much you wanted
to improve what you were doing, though there was no reward, no prize

beyond the excellence of doing it well. Believe me, that is becoming rare.
So rare that, before these last two years, I’d started to forget
that people could do difficult things through joy."

This collection, in its finest moments, does difficult things through that joy.