The St. Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) has recently published several well regarded collections of conference papers which reflect new and emerging positions in literary and cultural criticism.

McKenzie describes this work as 'the result of one philosopher's response to ten West Indian novels' (ix). As a philosopher and an academic, the author is concerned to develop and promote Caribbean philosophy and it is therefore fitting that much of the introduction is taken up with a defence of his approach. His book is not, he asserts, a way of understanding philosophy through the study of literature nor is it a 'philosophy of literature' since, as he rightly claims, this is 'close to what is now called literary theory' (2).

In this article I explore constructions of diasporic space in the work of two Caribbean-diaspora poets, Jean 'Binta' Breeze, and Dorothea Smartt, and examine the ways in which circuits of departure, arrival, and return in selected poems, function as sites from which complex, interconnected identities are produced. The region is commonly defined as a space of migratory flows, which are both permanent and impermanent, and characterized by frequent returns 'home' (Trotz & Mullings, 2013, p. 154).