Sturge Town: Poems

Award-winning poet and novelist Dawes’s (Bivouac) latest poetry collection takes its title from one of the earliest free villages in post-slavery Jamaica. It feels almost Yeatsian with its haunted past, and like Yeats with his tower, Dawes depicts a journey to an ancestral home in quiet, lyrical, sometimes painful poems, exploring the memories of a lifetime. In a sense, it is a travelogue of nostalgia, a guide to a world of haunted places, each known only by “the blood that has been shed there.” The waves of the Atlantic curling around the ankles of a preacher as he baptizes a young girl are suddenly a “garden of bones,” bearing forgotten fishermen and enslaved people. Filled with lyrical monologues and shimmering like the sand still wet from the waves, this book, like a folk tale or an ancient myth, is possessed by subliminal power.