REVIEWS J. Edward Chamberlin, Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993). ix, 325. $19.99. Postcolonial criticism is bedeviled by the question of aesthetics. What de fines postcolonial literature is, by definition, where it is from. Aesthetic judgments are mistrusted because they are imported. The interest of post colonial literature lies not in the qualities it might share with other literatures but in the qualities that make it different. The postcolonial critic thus relin quishes the authority to make evaluative or normative judgments, yet lays claim to a great authority, one that allows the critic to stand outside and analyze the text in terms of ideology. J. Edward Chamberlin’s long-awaited book, a celebration of contempo rary West Indian poetry in English, is a return to poetics that places the poets above the critics. It is because the poetry of Walcott, Brathwaite, and Goodison has proven itself a world treasure that it can redeem a West In dian national identity, and, conversely, it is because West Indian poets have succeeded in forging a national identity that their poetry is a world treasure. Chamberlin compares the current outpouring of poetry in the West Indies to the Renaissance, when Europeans “both discovered and invented themselves as people for whom certain values and traditions were precious” (272). Like Northrop Frye, echoes of whose style occur throughout, Chamberlin shows great deference before the poets, who are superior souls with access to spiritual wells from which they nourish their community and all of us. Much recent criticism that calls itself postcolonial prescribes what authors should or should not do. Chamberlin believes that poets do what they have to do. The critic does not judge poetry; poetry judges him. This careful respect is combined with a magisterial address to readers: readers must read properly. This study might almost be subtitled “Anatomy of West Indian Litera ture.” Like Frye’s book, it is an introduction— Chamberlin does not offer sustained close readings, and he addresses readers who might not know that Anthony Trollope wrote novels and that Malcolm X was a black leader — but it is an introduction that can inspire all readers by the sweep of its scope and by its vision of poetry as a single enterprise in which all poets are engaged. West Indian poetry defines a space rather than a history. Although 95 a major emphasis of the book is on how West Indian poetry bears witness to a heritage of slavery, Chamberlin’s concern is not primarily historical. The poetry is not discussed in terms of precursors and competing schools, and there is little discussion of how the communal consciousness might have been expressed before the contemporary outpouring of poetry, whether orally or in music. The sources of West Indian poetry lie not in the past but in the depths of the human spirit. West Indian poetry is a totality rather than a field. Bad poetry is excluded as an oxymoron. And V.S. Naipul is exorcised because he is not engaged in the common project (indeed, the common project defines itself as an answer to his despairing statement that nothing was ever created in the West Indies). At the same time, Chamberlin draws on the Bible, English Renaissance and Romantic poetry, the American Renaissance, and contemporary verse from Canada, Northern Ireland, and northern England for his comparisons. West Indian poetry is thus situated in a world (or a sea) of literature; the tensions faced by West Indian poets are the tensions faced by all poets everywhere. Chamberlin’s tour of the crossroads of West Indian poetry is divided into chapters, but these are not defined by subject matter, are very wide-ranging, and all circle around the same central issues, like Odysseus ever-returning. West Indian poetry is nourished by the tensions raised by a series of di chotomies that are at once artificial, inescapable, and useful. These di chotomies include artifice and nature (the natural in poetry, of course, al ways a result of artifice); the familiar and the strange (but familiar to whom and strange to whom? asks Chamberlin); form and content; engagement and detachment; humour and heroism; particulars and...