A Review of Frontiers of the Caribbean

Compelling and emphatic language toned down by academic speak.  A stitched-together structure that is both focused and diffuse.  The folk voices of Philip Nanton’s Frontiers of the Caribbean nevertheless come across, especially the accounts of his fellow Vincentians from interviews—or from personal profiling: “I cannot say that I knew my father well.  Perhaps he did not want to be known.  What I remember of his characteristics could fit on a postage stamp, but there were identifiable tendencies that were almost archetypal.”  The book could have done with more of such illustrative asides about the frontier between himself and his father.  A point is made about the dangers of discarding instructive parts of our essential selves; of misunderstanding how wilderness and civilization give shape and meaning to each other, noticeably when viewed from the sympathetic divide of their frontier.  

Nanton is bold and deliberate in his blend of the “scholarly” and the “creative,” shifting from jargony discourse to eloquent verse.  “Time for a song” is how he transitions to one of his poems.  The mash-up doesn’t always cohere as imagined or intended.   The frontier remains either a place still too ill-defined, or one looking very much like those elsewhere in North America, say that of the United States’ west, circa the 1800’s.  Perhaps even with an outpost run by “el hombre” cats like his father, “a hard-drinking rogue who loved to gamble—roulette, dog racing, cards—and could hold his liquour.”  An odd, critical love letter to St Vincent by one of its most searching sons, this book seems to say, “On the frontier, all perspectives, all approaches are possible.”