Staring Into My Soul – the conversations within …

Curtis Myrie launched his book of poems, Staring Into My Soul, at the 2nd annual Jamaica Brew Literary and Film Festival

“It’s a particular introspection about yourself … the questions you keep asking yourself and about developments around you,” Myrie said. The book is a collection of 75 poems, which the author said “prompts – and even pierces you for self-examination”.

The majority of the pieces feature a creative hybrid of standard English and Jamaican Patois – and the author, in the foreword by Clyde McKenzie, is described as a deft navigator of this “linguistic duality that defines our heritage.

“His poetry reflects an ability to see beneath the surface and to capture the unspoken truths at the heart of the human experience. Deeply introspective yet universally resonant, Myrie’s work explores themes of love, loss, hope, and the eternal human search for meaning,” McKenzie said.

The book is dedicated to his high school classmate of the St George’s College graduating class of 1974, the late Donovan Jackson who kept urging Myrie to write the book. He also credited high school teacher and coach, the late Joseph Sanguinetti.

Publishing partners of the book are Andrene Bonner and Faith Nelson,, and publication sponsorship was provided by Nunes, Scholefield, Deleon & Co, and the St George’s College Old Boys Association of Florida.

Kwame McPherson, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize Global 2023 winner, said the book highlights the determination and adaptability of people facing challengers and tapping into their inner strength to overcome adversity.

The book has four central themes – Garrison and Gordon House, Race and Kulcha, Family an Yaad, and Di Self and Di Soul.

In his review, Malachi Smith pointed to McKenzie’s foreword describing the author as “someone who has walked the back alleys of life and returned with stories worth hearing”.

Smith said Staring Into My Soul is about that and so much more. ‘It is understanding the intricacies of the Jamaican or Caribbean or African realities from the experience of a sharp-eyed scribe who has lived it – born into it, walk into it, went to school into it, went to bed into it, woke up into it, went to work into it, and is still heartened and simultaneously pained by it.

Film-maker and author Judith Falloon Reid said the language punches – and that every inch of the Jamaican experience is explored in live and living colour.

Under the theme Di Self and Di Soul, one may find the piece Facing Life quite haunting:

you shy away

from the mirror,

saying all di time

yu ah go face it

but shut yu eye

in front ah it

each time yu stan up like yu tuff

pure powder puff

man weh blink

each time yu tink

yu can dress up yuself inna new clothes,

covering up

how yu naked

facing all di blows.