Before the Rain

In bringing together poems and short stories in one collection, Christine Craig looks both inward at herself as the reflector and celebrant of the experiences of a long life, and outward as the observer and creator of the dramas of other lives. Her world encompasses hazard, cruelty, and the abuse of power but it is seen with a hopeful eye that pays homage to the resourcefulness of Jamaican ‘aunties’, finds joy in the promiscuity of a garden nurtured by a “horticultural hooligan” and thankfulness for those like the Jamaican agricultural workers who sustain life, or the refugees who bring a “fecund blossoming of beauty in a new terrain”. Her poetry, exact in sensuous description of sound, taste and smell, catches and celebrates the particularities of different life stages, and even in the heartbreakingly beautiful poem “Despedida” contemplates a farewell to life as another adventure. The stories traverse Jamaica, the American South and London. They begin with arrivals, returns and encounters that cross cultures and differing motivations. Attraction sometimes butts up against differences of class, race and politics, as in the “scuttled romance” between a Jamaican woman lecturer and American Peace Corps worker on the way to becoming a CIA operative. Other stories explore the realities of those, particularly women, for whom poverty and race make life precarious. In “Shaking the Family Tree”, a brilliantly imagined story set in war-time London, the encounter between Margarit, a young German-Jewish woman, sent by her husband to escape the holocaust to come, and a West Indian man, come to serve the “mother” country, offers a delicate balance of a relationship of cross-cultural possibility over the abyss of what Margarit must suspect is happening to the rest of her family in Germany. Here is fiction with a poet’s eye for the telling image, and poetry with a strong sense of story.