Shore/Lines

The poet laureate of the British Virgin Islands ruminates on themes of love, faith, home, and self—each located at the intersection of history and the natural world

SHORE/LINES IS A MEDITATION on resonance—across time, memory, language, and place. Emerging from a wonder and wandering on the nature of echoes, the collection is rooted in the environmental and historical textures of the British Virgin Islands, with journeys to Guyana and South Africa, yet always returning home. 

The poems dwell on the incantatory power of sound and how land, sea, and history reverberate through Caribbean selves, creating both deep intimacy and haunting distance. They explore the fragility and failure of the voice, the inevitability of silence, and the persistence of dreams and ancestral memory. In this collection, echoes both amplify what is spoken and transform it, generating new, often contradictory meanings. Sometimes the echoes are sound, sometimes image, sometimes place. They scatter through the poems like fragments awaiting reassembly, as the work moves through recurrent themes of love, faith, home, and self—each located at the intersection of history and the natural world.