Bücher von Andre Bagoo

Narcissus, from 2021 OCM Bocas Prize winner Andre Bagoo, is a typically brilliant work of poetry bringing together strands of the queer, nature, and the Narcissus myth, whether in ekphrasis or otherwise. In this powerful collection, Bagoo aexamines the varied dynamics of the body and mind with the narcissism of the soul, while fully embracing the work of art as a critical reflection on the human condition.

Andre Bagoo's Writing through Siddartha follows the lead of Writing through Finnegan's Wake, John Cage's sound-poem explorations of Joyce. In Writing through Siddartha Bagoo refashions Herman Hesse's eponymous novel, ripping out lines and phrases using an Oulipo style algorithm, replacing the novel's core with ghost poems, whose parenthood is a heady mix of Bagoo, Hesse and mathematics. Writing through Siddartha is experimental poetry with a spiritual centre, proving that even if the heart of a text is removed, its soul remains.

"Poems traverse geographical locations, from Trinidad to other Caribbean islands and as far as Iceland. Bagoo explores daily life, love, art, history, literature, myth, popular culture, ritual and the molten ground of memory, bringing together douens, lionfish, Auden, Mozart, Caravaggio and Tchaikovsky, among other figures. Bring the fire, burn."

Aptly titled are these poems: they are like vials without bottoms . held up, looked through, a universe can be discerned. They pour and continue to pour a mixture of guile and subterfuge, language that contradicts, and bargains for its own sanity, contents in volume denying the size of these trick vessels. - Mervyn Taylor