Island Man
Starting with the first stanza we already notice that Grace Nichols has written this poem in a different structure to other poems. Some sentences are long and some short with only one word in at the start. She talks about an island man waking up on his island we know he is dreaming because she says “island man wakes up to the sound of blue surf in his head”.
In the second stanza she talks more about the island, what is happening there and what it looks like. She talks of the people and animals that live there “wild seabirds and fishermen pushing out to sea”. She then says “the sun surfacing defiantly from the east of his small emerald island he always comes back groggily groggily”. This means that wherever you are and whatever the situation is the sun will always come up and go down therefore, he will always remember his island wherever he is. She says he always comes back, meaning he will never stay in his dream about the island.
The next stanza says “comes back to sands of a grey metallic soar to surge of wheels to dull North Circular roar. She is saying he always comes back from his dream to reality, sadly and not wanting to. Also this is the only part of rhyme in the poem “soar and roar”.
In the next stanza Nichols says “muffling muffling his crumpled pillow waves island man heaves himself” she is saying that he is just on the edge of awaking and the creases on his pillow where he has been sleeping are like waves to him.
Lastly she says “Another London day” this is giving the impression that island man does not enjoy living in London and wants to be at his home in the Caribbean, also there is no punctuation throughout the whole poem, I think that she does this because he will always be in London and the routine that he has dreaming about his island by night and working in a busy City by day will never end so there is no full stops because they mean the end of a sentence.
