Mervyn Morris was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica in 2014. He has had an abiding impact on the literature of the Caribbean as poet, essayist and teacher. Peelin Orange, with its mix of Englishes (Standard, Jamaican Creole — patois — and a combination of the two), and its variety of forms, from free verse to metred and rhymed measures, represents half a century of invention and re-invention. Morris knows how universals can inhere in the local, the incarnation in a Caribbean setting. With his light, intense musicality, he speaks to and for a community. His wit, his love of people and places, his anarchic 'Afro-Saxon' spirit, ensure that his poems are full of surprise in language, image and in the turns of sense they make.
