Reading the Seventies in a Different Stylie: Dub, Poetry, and the Urgency of Message

This essay attempts to recall the Caribbean 1970s through the archive of the author's own poetry, released as the collection The Coup Clock Clicks in 2018. In unearthing and preparing these poems—most written between 1970 and 1983—the author was struck by how they were, in effect, a time capsule of a lost moment, capturing the senses and sensibilities of a generation. Traveling across the social, cultural, and political landscapes of Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Grenada, they suggest the dynamism, motivations, and missteps that characterized the denizens of those hectic but insufficiently comprehended times.