Trailing the Sun’s Sweat

This book is a retracing of landscape, heritage and culture, spanning continents and time. Interspersed with quotations from Columbus’s journal, de Weever recounts and visits her native British Guiana as seen by its conquerors and ravishers, and by its survivors. Rich with the flora and fauna of island and Amazon, the book poses native against the encounter with the native. The eyes of the caiman look out from the waters, while the visiting European artist paints delicate watercolors of butterflies and lush tropical plants. Some of the poems inhabit the oppressed within our northern borders, such as Tituba, accused witch of Salem, or the lynched Native American Jacqueline Peters. In retracing her own heritage and origins, de Weever invites us to confront the beauty, and violence, of the hemisphere we share.