Approaching Sabbaths - Jennifer Rahim

APPROACHING SABBATHS
Jennifer Rahim

POEMS

Jennifer Rahim’s poems move seamlessly between the inwardly confessional, an acute sensitivity to the distinctive subjectivities of an immediate circle of family, friends and neighbours, and a powerful sense of Trinidadian place and history. Few have written more movingly or perceptively of what can vex the relationship between daughters and mothers, or with such a mixture of compassion and baffled rage about a daughter’s relationship to her father.
If Sylvia Plath comes to mind, acknowledged in the poem ‘Lady Lazarus in the Sun’, the comparison does Rahim no disfavours; Rahim’s voice and world is entirely her own. There is in her work a near perfect balance between the disciplined craft of the poems, and their capacity to deal with the most traumatic of experiences in a cool, reflective way. Equally, she has the capacity to make of the ordinary something special and memorable.
Here is no self-indulgent misery memoir, not least in its compassion and involvement with other lives. The threat and reality of fragmentation – of psyche’s, of lives, of a nation – is ever present, but the shape and order of the poems provide a saving frame of wholeness. Poem after poem offers phrases of a satisfying weight and appositeness, like the description of the killers of a boy as ‘mere children,/ but twisted like neglected fields of cane’.

AUTHOR
JENNIFER RAHIM is fiction writer, poet and literary critic uit Trinidad. She was a Senior Lecturer at The Liberal Arts Department, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad.
Her 2009 poetry collection Approaching Sabbaths received a Casa de las Américas Prize in 2010, for best book in the category Caribbean Literature in English or Creole. Rahim won the fiction category and the overall 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, awarded at the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, for her 2017 book Curfew Chronicles. Rahim died on 13 March 2023, at the age of 60.

PRODUCT SPECIFICATION
English | paperback | 132 pages | Peepal Tree Press Ltd. | Leeds, UK | 2009