The book has been well received. For example a review in BWIA Caribbean Beat, Nov-Dec 1996 said: "The story is beautifully written and the plot is a real page-turner. Best of all, this is the first part of Bron's Quest. This wonderful book is certain to be a collector's item for lovers of Caribbean literature"

The main character leaves her homeland for the US, but her childhood mission has been to defeat the secrecy of her family, to discover truth and to cause her mother, grandmother, aunts and other relatives to break through their individual life cells and share their beings with each other.

Harris is a writer with a poetic flow of language that is truly distinctive and full of potent meaning. As Margaret listens under tables, behind doors and in all the concealed places of the large colonial house that her grandmother sees cracking and disintegrating around her, she becomes the only cohesive force of a family decaying into fragments, each part severing its connections with any other.

It is the Guyanese era of the '60s. Anti-communist tales of terror, sudden fearful migrations and the transition following the end of British colonialism form the external anxieties for a family locked into complexes of race and elitism. The interior shadows the exterior as illness, violence and insanity grip the family, whose house becomes *like the colony itself* a prison of consciousness and "unhappy cage" of terrifying self-doubt and distrust in others.

Yet the voice of reason and prophecy breaks out from the surface insanity of Margaret's grandmother.

"We inhabit a strange web of fictions replete with family histories rooted in violence... rage ... incest ... sorrow ... betrayals," she confesses.

But, as Margaret has learned, and the engrossed reader too through Harris's startling and mesmeric novel with its promise of redemption, both personally and socially, "We have something within us that can change the pain and violence and suffering into something rich and glorious."

*Progeny of Air*, a collection of lyrics, sketches schoolmasters, students, and teachers encountered in Jamaican schools. These pieces stage a complex, almost Victorian dialogue between sexuality and sinfulness -- accepting a tension between the twain, (I used to accept this tension, but I've been to France.) There is Claudette, a once-lusted-after teacher who becomes an illegal immigrant in the U.S: "Five years of nun-like purity, and now this," Another character, Miss Everbreast, sparks the poet's desire to visit Canada, a disillusioning experience. Still, he hopes to meet her again: "let me embrace you, burying my face / in the world of mystery and adventure still caught in your bosom," And there is Perch, with "her fish-shocked eyes," who had been caught "spread and supine /on the woodwork table / cradling the woodwork / teacher between her thighs." Dawes is at his best when writing longish lines; he seems to require almost prose-length measures to release his music; shorter ones cramp and constrain his voice. His images are powerful, but bear witness to poetic intelligence that relishes treating the messiness of history and of love, A slave ship operative possesses a "crotch teeming with syphilis and worms"; a lover notes his "squandered innocence; / spilt seed on the urine-smelling mattress"; a white teacher speaks "the coloured cockney of expatriates," while his pupils dream of startling "his poor blond head with blood."

Though Dawes is a vital poet, his work is harmed by one problem: good, vibrant lines are prodded or clouded by laxer ones. In short, he fails to concentrate his poems: prolixity sacrifices exactness. (Note: Peter Gzowski is transformed into Peter Zorski perhaps deliberately. on p.88) Yet, *Prophets*, Dawes's book-length, narrative poem, written in unrhymed triplets, is a capital advance over his tyro work Dawes's voice sings in narrative, a form in which he pays obvious debts (and homage ) to Derek Walcott, the Nobel laureate of Anglo-Caribbean poetry. Certainly, Walcott's 1990 opus, *Omeros*, haunts the structure of *Prophets*; Dawes has absorbed the master's genius for contrasting demotic and standard Englishes.

Then again. *Prophets's* plot suggests a tinge of Alexander Pope's comic epic, *The Rape of the Lock* (1717), for Clarice, Dawes's Bible-packing heroine, exhibits some of the coquetry of Pope's Belinda. Indeed, Dawes examines sexual guilt and hypocrisy among members of a holyrollers sect in Kingston, Jamaica.

The narrator, a would-be lover spurned by Clarice for supposedly religious reasons, discovers that she has been fooping illicitly with a church member "I ... dare to imagine her coupling / in the blackness of the beach, / her coming, that same mouth I saying, 'Harder, harder, harder.' / I am seeking clues, some explaining / that will reaveal the sleight-of-hand / of this fundamentalist miracle..." Dawes writes evocatively of Clarice ("the paste of Pond's white on her face," her "thick, dipped-in-burnt-sienna lips"), poets (who wait "for night to gather. when they will crawl out / and collect the leaves into sheathes sandwiched / between elegiac introduction and well researched glossary), and a thousand other things. This book demands and holds attention.