Be it jade, it shatters. 
Be it gold, it breaks.
Be it quetzal feather, it tears apart.
Not forever on earth; only a little while here.
Aztec Prayer
Introduction
Grace Nichols is among the fine West Indian poets. She is Guyanese, a prize-winning writer with published collections of poetry, one novel for adult audiences and several children’s books. She has built a prominent career in Great Britain where she lives and has been commissioned to read and perform her poems to secondary schools across the UK who study her work for their exams.
Nichols’ first volume of poetry I is A Long Memoried Woman (Karnak House, 1983) won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. A later collection, Sunris (Virago, 1996), won the Guyana Prize for Poetry, and her first novel Whole of A Morning Sky (1986) was shortlisted for the Guyana Prize. Virago also published her other poetry collections The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984) and Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman (1989).