Trick Vessels

"Reading André Bagoo is an experience like none other. He is a true Caribbean poet - the reader is lapped in gorgeous, disturbing words; immersed in a nurturing, disintegrative sea. He is also, and marvellously, a poet who speaks to our times. Bagoo's background in law and journalism informs the disabused eye he brings to his appreciation of the real circumstances of our tricky, threatened humanity. With the loving touch of a magician, he releases our world from surveillance. These poems sing of those ordinary moments 'when the creature is vulnerable', knowing that the 'key to unlocking mystery is not making a fuss'. Entering Trick Vessels is a voyage into the fairytale cavern where nervous trees bear gems in a perpetually fruiting night. I urge you to give yourself over to this book. You will re-emerge into your daily living, astonished and tender." -Vahni Capildeo "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 "Bagoo excavates a land of erasures and decodes 'the cipher for these trick vessels'. Yet, these ciphers provide, not a hoped for return, but a foothold from which to climb into the present. In this book, Bagoo has delivered us a new way forward." -Jim Goar