Cecil Gray, Leaving the Dark. Toronto, Canada: Lilibel Publications. 1998. 103 pages. pb. Cecil Gray's third poetry collection, an exploration of metaphors, images, ideas, and place the West Indies as well as the wider world conveyed with assurance in a surprising variety of poetic forms, from rhymed couplets and sonnets to free verse and stream of consciousness, offers something for every taste. Yet the voice is consistently reflective, considered, and controlled. Speaking to the theme of lost opportunities and the twists and turns of fortune, he can go from the free, associative "Birthday," the life history of a promising waif who, in the end, turns to alcohol, to the epigrammatic, aphoristic quatrains of "The Sixth Age": We chase our ghosts in different ways, elusive though they prove to be; swindled the ledger of dead days to make the red and black agree. He can be hard, unsparing, as in "Deserters": When my dreams were young and militant I assaulted the world with angry reproach. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . We take turnings, don't we, avowed insurgents, when stones cut our heels and we see soft grassy paths appear. But old selves come out of the dark and stalk us like sleuths as we head, deserters, for a border to cross. And he can be gentler, with a touch of irony, as in "White Christmas" and "In Reply." Always conscious of his West Indian roots, the poet touches on the complexity and intertwining of those roots in "Yoruba Drums": Africa and England made me West Indian, special, unique, so blind to the skin's complexion I am set free to dance to Yoruba drums and to sonnets by Shakespeare, to spend all good coins the world's mints offer. My celebration sends me beating a bongo, striking sweet strums on a cuatro. . . Even as a tourist in "Rome Revisited," traipsing from one monument to another, his reveries drift "across an ocean to the stakes in my own Antilles." The last poem, "A Child's History Lessons," summarizes his concerns about the islands past, present, and future. This attractively presented volume is rich with experience and tradition. The reader comes away with a sense of the poet as a thoughtful, reflective man who treasures friendship, books, and history. About life in general, his poems express tenderness and wonder; about his life and work, as in "Pages that Turn," a sense of humility and humor: At present I cannot complain. All the words I could pen found time to make up the simple quatrain vision allows, nothing sublime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Before the book shuts like a door I wish once to scrape at a lode, to chip in its veins of metaphor and prise a small nugget that glowed. I found more than one small nugget. Other readers will want to collect their own from the ample supply in this collection. Phillis Gershator St. Thomas, USVI Copyright © by Phillis Gershator