The Blaze of the Poui

The punch is a stunning one, landing its blow with such finesse you are surprised you didn't see it coming. . . . McMorris credibly sounds the mature intonations of a late-career poet when he speaks of 'the smell of the world in its dotage coming to roost.' Poetic equilibrium of this order is a rare thing when managing such charged material, but in a young poet it is cause for small amazement.

Intermingling an erudite but folksy persona with a metrics that suggests 17th-century England, McMorris sifts and often lush, deceptively whole Caribbean landscape for the traces of a harsh English colonial past. . . . From all of these poems emerges a poetic voice that is at once deeply engaged in with an English poetic tradition, but not afraid to, through the tactics of postmodernism, to trouble the terms of its extended contract.

McMorris is a poet utterly devoted to the sensual beauty of language and he crafts lines dense and strong enough to bear the crashing forces of history and identity contained within them. McMorris brings many literary histories to his work: Caribbean, European, and American poetries all meet here. . . . When McMorris brings language, longing, and the physical world together, allowing diverse contemporary voices to rise up and carry his poems, his work is wrenching, lovely, and powerfully seductive.