SOURCE: Reiss, Timothy J. “Reclaiming the Soul: Poetry, Autobiography, and the Voice of History.” World Literature Today 68, no. 4 (autumn 1994): 883-90.

In the following essay, Reiss links the structure of Brathwaite's poetry to seventeenth-century England by positing that the poet's work often has an underlying structure derived from iambic pentameter, a meter that Brathwaite has tweaked to reflect the historical changes that have led to the postcolonial culture of Barbados.

Through Kamau Brathwaite's work run three favorite metaphors. The earliest uses the iambic pentameter that had become a norm in English poetry from roughly the seventeenth century. The second represents the Caribbean Islands as the result of a child's (or god's) skipping stones in a great curve across the ocean from the coast of Guyana to the tip of Florida. The third transforms the waters buried deep in the porous rock that is Barbados into the welling of a...