I have no idea how many read it, but following the recent Guyana Prize awards, a lady from the University of Leeds in the UK, Lori Shelbourn, herself part of the jury deciding on the awards, wrote a review of the collection of poems by Cassia Alphonso that won the Guyana Prize for Poetry 2012. The review appeared on Sunday 6 October in Al Creighton’s weekly column on the arts in Sunday Stabroek, and it can only be described as glowing. Cassia’s work in this collection – it is entitled ‘Black Cake Mix’ – is revealed as a striking venture into dialect poetry, and Shelbourn’s delight in the work is there in almost every line of the review. She quotes several excerpts from the work (it’s a fairly comprehensive presentation) and lauds several aspects of the poet’s skills that space does not permit me to reproduce here.
If my memory is accurate, the column is headed by a line from the poetry where the author is conveying the difference in appearance of one of her characters and says that the ideal is to see her in the morning before the rum takes her. At that time, says Alphonso, “she was a jewel fuh watch sparkle.” Shelbourn goes on to rave about this collection where she says Alphonso shows “a great capacity for writing lively, engaging and approachable poems that tackle big issues in an original way.” In one line she speaks of Cassia as