First published in 1972, winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, On the Coast established Brown as one of the finest young poets of the post-Walcott
generation, Ted Hughes wrote: "Wayne Brown's poems are often startling and always the genuine thing. His West Indies is real, infinite and near. His flexible natural instinct for ranging
through the different and contrary dimensions of his life seems to me new---and his life feels actual." Now, in the year following his death, one sees how seminal Brown's poetry has been, both
for its intrinsic qualities, and for his crucial role as the mentor of a good many among the current generation of Caribbean poets.
As Mervyn Morris suggests in his intimate and scholarly introduction, there is a continuity of converns that make Wayne Brown a quintessentially Caribbean poet who writes of love, time,
history, race and class, self-discovery, sea, creative life --- and the turbulent energies of the region's nature. As well as On the Coast, this edition contains the poems included in the later
collection, Voyages, published in Trinidad in 1989.
