The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.

In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.

The classics can console. But not enough.

Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.

Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god.

The poem is itself a mirror.