By turns earthy and incantatory, down-home and harrowing, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You is also funny as hell and, to quote one of its nearly 20,000 lines, “sadder than the sea.”

Trench Town Rock, Kamau Brathwaite’s long documentarian song, affords insistent ‘nansic spin –a splay of clips, massed facts and faces, rare synaesthetic call and cry rolled into brash typographic distraint.

When I first encountered Frank Stanford’s poetry…I felt a fine rush of hope and envy I feel occasionally whenever a poet’s language pushes me far beyond my own.

Stanford is in touch with some of poetry’s more primal and mysterious possibilities.