This volume brings together JP Clark’s nine collections of poems. These cover fifty years, and already display his genius as a poet. With Full Tide which includes his latest poems, it can now be argued, allowing for all the politics of African literature, here is a great poet, the pre-eminent poet of a unique period of the 20th century during which a few of his generation created on the continent, side by side with others of their kind in French and Portuguese, a new literature in English.