Sea Grapes is a collection of lyric poems on a variety of themes, including the socio-political and the personal; poems about the Caribbean and about the USA and England; poems that invoke or pay tribute to other poets and painters; poems sharply, even bitterly critical, or deeply meditative, or radiant with a solemn joy of life. These groupings sometimes overlap. There is also a variety of verse forms, from free verse to poems with a blank-verse base, including one or two that may be loosely called extended sonnets. There are short-line poems, some in dimeter, varied with trimeter, and sometimes suggesting litany or chant.
The collection plays variations on certain notes struck in Another Life (1973). That v…
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