Ruby Bute is the first St. Martin woman to publish a volume of poetry. Her poems, collected in this her first book, a seminal work, is fundamental to forming a body of "S'maatin" literature, which is now as a fledgling phoenix thrashing in the glowing coal keel of our Oral Tradition. Bute's success and that of a genuine St. Martin people's literature, will be in the pursuit and engagement of originality and excellence, and in so doing anneals its place as a dynamic component of Our Caribbean's great oral/literary traditions. Golden Voices of S'maatin is also about direction, the linking of Self into Nation, and it achieves sincerely in being a (maybe pre-iconoclastic) gentle guide, and generative of a "Sweet S'maatin" pride, an intense loving warmth, and a family strength which is, however harassed of late, steeped in the folk values and living culture of this Caribbean nation.