These powerful and original poems are the expression of a life which spans a childhood on the sugar estates of Guyana, a young manhood involved with such liberating spirits of the anti-colonial movement in the Guyanese arts as Martin Carter, Wilson Harris and Ivan Van Sertima, the painful decision to go into exile and years of disillusion in Britain.

Yet though some of these poems stare into the face of despair, the collection as a whole expresses a visionary faith in the regenerative power of love and the freedom of the poetic imagination. The collection brings together the radical anticolonial poems and an African Guyanese man's paens of praise to Indian womanhood of Pray for Rain (1958); the poems of psychic disturbance of Sources of Agony (1979) and many previously unpublished. The language of these poems is marked by a rich fertility of image and a bold heterogeneity of diction, a reflection of the diverse sources of experience from which they grow.

"Williams's journey from hope to disillusion parallels the experience of many other black people, old and young; but he retails that journey with sensitivity and maturity..."
Prabu Guptara, British Book News

"'To Alice' and 'Ann Whittaker' deal with love, that most ordinary of miracles, in a way that makes it seem magical... They range from protest to bawdiness with room for celebration somewhere between."
Jeffrey Robinson, Kyk-over-Al.

Milton Williams was born in Guyana. Part of a group of writers which included Martin Carter and Wilson Harris, he left Guyana in 1960, and lived in Newcastle for many years.