"This is a critical edition of forty-one poems written by one or more women in England and first published in one of the earliest Caribbean newspapers, the Barbados Gazette. Twenty-six of the poems, assigned to a single unnamed author, constitute a sequence addressed to a man charting several stages of a love affair which ended unhappily. The remaining fifteen, which are also implicitly or explicitly of female authorship, may be by the same woman.

These are included for comparison, along with all the prefatory material provided in Caribbeana, the collection from the Barbados Gazette published in 1741. Fewer than half of the poems have been reprinted since that date, and the aim of the edition is to open them up to a wider audience."--BOOK JACKET.