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Saltwater Spirits: Poems from the Island's Edge
Paperback
General FictionLiterary Fiction
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Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Dec 26 2025
Pages: 74
Weight: 0.43
Height: 0.15 Width: 8.50 Depth: 11.00
Language: English
In Saltwater Spirits: Poems from the Island's Edge, Callista Charlemagne-Daniel offers a lyrical journey into the living relationship between island people and the sea. Rooted in Caribbean folklore, ancestral memory, and oral tradition, this collection listens closely to waters that remember, spirits that linger, and communities shaped by tide, labor, and loss.
Here, the sea is not scenery. It is witness and archive, teacher and trickster, destroyer and healer. It holds the echoes of fishermen who read the tide like scripture, of grandmothers whose wisdom moves with the waves, and of spirits who rise at dawn and circle the reef. Each poem stands on the shoreline between the visible and the unseen, where memory and myth speak in the same breath.
Structured as a ceremonial passage, from origin and folklore through labor, storm, grief, and return, the collection unfolds in five interconnected sections. Together, they trace a cycle of belonging that mirrors the tide itself: arrival, departure, and renewal. The poems are marked by restraint rather than excess, trusting silence as much as sound, and allowing repetition to function as ritual rather than ornament.
Charlemagne-Daniel's voice is shaped by the cadence of spoken storytelling and the rhythms of island life. Her lines move with the patience of water, attentive to detail and grounded in lived experience. Folkloric figures such as La Sirèn, Papa Dlo, and the drowned who walk by moonlight are treated not as spectacle, but as moral and ecological forces, guardians of balance, memory, and consequence.
Throughout the collection, salt preserves what history attempts to erode. Deep water keeps truths that resist forgetting. Grief is acknowledged without sentimentality, and healing is offered not as resolution, but as continuity. The final poems return gently to shore, affirming that while the sea refuses endings, it allows us to learn how to carry what remains.
Saltwater Spirits is a book for readers drawn to poetry of place, ancestry, and elemental power. It speaks to those who understand that listening is a form of inheritance, and that the sea, patient and watchful, remembers us even when we drift.
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