| Summary: | Abstract
This essay combines close reading and contemporary cultural theories, in order to explore several figurative
patterns in which individual and collective identity are shaped in contemporary Caribbean British poetry. In the
context of the post-war multicultural Great Britain and of the transatlantic cultural traffic connected with the
Caribbean, the poetic discourse has become a site of cultural negotiation and visionary expression. It will be
shown that none of the values associated with multiculturalism, transculturalism or cosmopolitanism are taken
as fixed, but they are rather options and positions on the continuum global-local, as well as facets of an
emerging complex cultural reality. The authors included in the present analysis – three Guyanese poets, David
Dabydeen, Grace Nichols and John Agard, and the Barbadian Dorothea Smartt – display a great awareness of
contemporary cultural change, best rendered using a culturally hybrid poetic language.
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