Scope and Contents From Publishers Weekly: A number of august poet and scholar Brathwaite's recent books of poetry contain substantial revisions of earlier works; this 20th collection is the latest and most compelling of them, collecting in one volume a trilogy--Mother Poem, Sun Poem and X/Self--first published by Oxford University Press between 1977 and 1987. Mother Poem depicts familial and social life in Barbados, while Sun Poem focuses on a father and the growth of a young son, and X/Self posits its mature subject within a larger history that reaches at least as far back to the time when "Rome burns/ & our slavery begins." Ancestors recasts all three books by stressing as strongly as possible the spoken aspects of the text (thereby allowing regional and local dialects to threaten the homogenizing tendencies of "proper" English), cladding them in jagged breaks, computerized glyphs, "Sycorax video style" type, extended puns and unorthodox spellings: "cause no bright/ man cyaaan be// faddah to...