(Poui, Cave Hill Journal of Creative Writing, No: XI, December 2010; eds Mark McWatt, Jane Bryce, Hazel Simmons-McDonald, Mark Jason Welch, Dept. of Language, Linguistics and Literature, UWI, Barbados; 186 p)
Continued from last week
True to its origins as the initial outlet for the products of creative writing workshops at Cave Hill and even for the writing courses in fiction and poetry run by Bryce and McWatt, Poui is a school of experimentation. For years now it has been exhibiting newer forms of experimental work by successive generations of writers and this intensifies in Number XI. The short, sharp, fresh and sometimes startling pieces of short fiction that began to appear in previous volumes continue in this number, seeming to have matured into a conscious form of the short story in which succinctness, brevity and a Mervyn Morris-like frugality of words, meaning and statement are characteristic. In this volume Aajee’s Gift by Vashti Bowlah and Malika by Rob Leyshon are