THESE are two volumes of works by Caribbean poets.

Best Poems of Trinidad is a reprint of an anthology published in 1943.

Song comes from Guyana and is, perhaps more contemporary, having been published for the first time this year.

A.M. Clarke, himself a poet and author, has gone into the garden of Trinidad verse and has gathered an excellent collection of flowers.

The poems are mostly in free verse, with a few in the more traditional rhyming mould; but they all bear the stamp of thinking and writing that has its own style.

One of the finest poems in the collection is Dreams by Ernest A. Carr.

Written in the sonnet form, it speaks of the desire to touch the stars, to hear the anthem of the heavenly spheres. It is also a cry from the heart for faith and vision:

So in our rigmarole of raucous years

We dream beyond the veil of place and time;

On misty base inflated hope uprears

To feed and spur a universal mime.

Perchance these slow probationary years

End in some far-off unimagined clime

Edgar Mittelholzer, better known as a writer of successful novels, shows a poetic side in Mood of February Eleventh 1940 - a sombre musing on life's difficulties and of the need to overcome them.

A poem of strange mysticism is The Red Earth by Hugh Conrad Stollmeyer. Three rhymed stanzas express the poet's acknowledgement of a Higher Being:

I am the lush grass bowing in wonder

Thou are the red earth in the field

When Best Poems of Trinidad was first published in 1943, it carried a preface by Albert Gomes, who will be remembered as one of the notable political figures in Trinidad at the time. But not so well-known was that he wrote poetry; two of his poems appear in the publication.

Meanwhile, Song is a collection of poems on the themes of joy and pain, of broken hearts and broken dreams yet with an almost musical quality, as though they were intended to be sung.

The title poem Song, is a vivid word portrait of a woman singing the Ave Maria and of the effect the singing has on the listener:

What a wondrous thing a song is!

Voice given grace, breath

given wings, and the soul

that hears it blessed