Arnold R. Highfield, ed. Collage One: Poets of St. Croix. St. Croix, U.S.V.I.: Antilles Press, 1990. 81 pages.


Nine poets (Marty Campbell, Alfredo E. Figueredo, Gary Harold, Arnold R. Highfield, S.B. Jones-Hendrickson, Richard Schrader, Erika Smilowitz, Guy Stiles, and Mark Sylvester) got together after Hurricane Hugo tore through St. Croix on September 17, 1989. That September, everyone lost something. People who saw the island from above, via helicopter, said it looked as though it had been bombed. Even lives were lost, though the number was thought to be miraculously low considering the scale of destruction. All this to preface what the editor of Collage One describes as a "shared sense of helplessness." While the contributors to this project may have lost their homes, books, clothes, gardens, pets, and while they experienced, in that period, bouts of disorientation and depression and seemingly endless days of coping without running water and electricity, they found a way "to transform the ridiculous into the real," to convert transient scraps of paper into something solid.
The collection contains only three poems about the hurricane, but I found them among the most compelling because they are so immediate and concrete. Gary Harold succinctly isolates moments of truth:

There's just this here and now
this present tense of the eye
remembering the tastes of fear
my back to the bathroom door
the walls pulsing with the pressure
sitting in dark water
remembering I talked to God
instead of about him
that I bargained for my daughters' lives
as though the one he wanted was me
that I saw the stars
the roof having exploded
in the rush of the eye's west wall

And there will be a tomorrow
walking in the aftermath
the bombed and twisted litter
of trees and roofs and lives
that will all be too much to know
and I will find myself with a broom
sweeping water from a roofless room

In a more didactic vein, Richard Schrader asks "What is the Message?" In this passage he vividly reveals answers at the heart of the question:

Yoh mek bull bawl all night.
And yoh mek galvanize roof fly clean off
house.

The sea come all ah shore.
Conch shell and seaweed deh all ah fish
market.

Yoh tek de leaves off de trees.
De grass yoh tun black and brown.
Yoh left nothing green.

Blue Mountain and Mount Eagle sucked
dry.

Nothing is hidden now. Yoh can see
the island through and through.

Describing truths, looking for answers, and then, in Guy Stiles' poem, "St. Croix," trying to categorize the experience:

It was just after
the hurricane named Hugo
passed over this
island we live on
that I said
I didn't think anything
so inhuman so vicious
should be given
a human name.
But you said I don't
agree, I think anyone
human could be as
vicious as inhuman
as this was.

Reading this collection, I marveled at the variety in style, subject matter, and outlook among the poets, yet a sense of community shines through, partly, perhaps, because the book was a collective effort in the aftermath of disaster. The poets' work is arranged alphabetically, and Mark Sylvester gets the last word—appropriately enough, given the editor's desire to produce something solid and real after all the loss and destruction:

I want...
to drag the me
out of myself
to face reality.