Rivers of Time - Collected Poems (Available Sept 2008)

Cy's poems are sparks of light thrown off from a life lived to the fullest. They are rooted in the British West Indian colony of British Guiana, then track through the trauma of WWII Europe where as a RAF navigator the author was shot down over Holland and incarcerated in a Nazi prison camp. Having fought for the mother country, the racial bar on his chosen profession pushed Cy into show business - singing the news in calypso; theatre; movies - then into taking on the inherent inequities of British society, by setting up Drum the first black arts centre, followed by his production of the Concord multicultural arts festivals. The poems map the poet's route, from the Keats of empire through the senseless loss of war, to the anger of the sixties, culminating in a 2-year national tour of Aimé Césaire's Cahier - a tour de force of black discovery and reconciliation. This transcendence was completed by his immersion in the non-dualist philosophy of the Tao Te Ching and an in-depth study of the steel pan, the gift of the West Indies to the world; a transmutation of industrial waste metal into healing sound. And so the later poems find him creating alternative healing realities at the crossroads of so many different journeys; enriching us like the panman, from basic materials - in his case pen and paper - and from the soul.


Pre order from Amazon UK or Amazon Com
Published by Naked Light (21 Sep 2008)
ISBN 0955217822 96 pp, £7.00

Blackness & the Dreaming Soul

"Shoving Leopard is proud to announce the publication of Cy Grant's latest book, Blackness and the Dreaming Soul.

“..a masterful and compassionate assessment of the Western paradigm .. one of the top cultural studies of this decade. A masterwork"…. --Theodore D. Hall, Ph.D., author of "Over the Bones of the Dead-: Evolutionary Science--Past, Present & Future."

"Backness & the Dreaming Soul does not pull its punches – it has its finger smack on the pulse of what is eating away at the very heart of civil society" Professor Gus John

“……(his) holistic vision is truly multicultural, implying a new era of mutual respect and the end of a Western monopoly on definitions of reality. As such, it is a truly liberating book" David Lorimer Scientific & Medical Network----------

"The power of the book, and what makes it relevant to all of us, is the temper of reality that reflects the life of someone whose background and search for his own truth has had him open to some of the sharpest issues that are currently shaping human consciousness. " John Moat, author - co-founder of the Arvon Foundation.




Now available at Amazon see link below


The fact that March 2007 also marks the bicentenary of the Parliamentary vote to abolish the slave trade (though it was a further 63 years before British support for the international trade ended), and recent evidence of abiding racial tension and inequality in Britain, can only enhance the relevance and resonance of this important book. Launching March 26th 2007."


Blackness and the Dreaming Soul is an account of a long journey of self-discovery involving an ever deepening awareness of the causes of our current alienation from each other and the natural primordial world. It is an alchemical venture, exploring the darkness of the human psyche: being black and trapped in a white culture, as well as being white and caught in an ambush of denial. Written without bitterness and recrimination, Blackness & the Dreaming Soul is neither pure biography nor philosophical manifesto, but grows out of the author’s childhood as the great grandson of a slave in British Guiana. The book chronicles his career during a long sojourn in Britain, as a World War II RAF officer (two years spent as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany), qualifying as a barrister at law, to a career in show business spanning stage, film, radio and TV. In the late 50s, Cy’s was the first black face to appear regularly on television, singing the news in calypso.


Blackness & the Dreaming Soul transcends attempts at categorization. It is a reconstruction of the way we make our reality, a journey leading the author to a holistic outlook beyond the frustrations that have dogged his life, beyond anger, beyond division and polarity, to a vision of unity in diversity in which all things are connected; man and nature, earth and cosmos.




“Blackness & the Dreaming Soul does not pull its punches – it has its finger smack on the pulse of what is eating away at the very heart of civil society in Britain’’ Professor Gus John