Like most Caribbean-born writers, Merle Collins chronicles the struggles of her people. The added factors of beings a woman and coming of age in the 1960s create the raw ingredients for someone who writes with great passion about her people and her times. She not only witnessed the worldwide social unrest and upheaval of the 1960s, but observed the beginnings of the women's rights movement in the United States and elsewhere. These issues also added fuel to her creative fire. Her work is--and has always been-- infused with the intertwining of personal and political themes. According to an article by Rhonda Cobham (published in Benson, Eugene and L.W. Conolly, The Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, New YorkRoutledge, 1994), in an introduction to her volume The Dawn Breaks! Poems Dedicated to the Grenadian People (1985), Ngugi wa Thiong'o notes the similarities between the work of politically committed poets and dramatists in Africa and Collins' work.

Although she established her reputation as a poet with her early Dub poetry (written for performance or music), Collins is probably best known for her novel, Angel (1987): a coming-of-age story set in Grenada and spanning the period from the Depression to the fall of the revolutionary government in 1983. In much of her work, Collins likes to tell stories about Caribbean women who tell stories, which, since she spent most of her childhood in Grenada and was raised around women who told stories, makes sense. Other common themes in her works include the effects of colonialism on the people of her native Grenada and the revolution that occurred there in the 1970s and 1980s, until it was quashed by the United States' invasion of the island in 1983. This end to the revolution caused her to move to Britain because she was unable to focus on her work in a country that had been so radically changed and that she had so much loved, according to a biography by Patricia Joan Saunders, published in Dictionary of Literary Biography.

Besides the novel Angel, Collins has written another novel, several volumes of poetry and many short stories. Collins' themes of colonialism and her use of varying dialect and language--she is considered by many critics to be a master of this craft--in the majority of her work makes her a well respected, fairly well known modern writer. For readers, the diversity of her works-- from her novel Angel to short stories such as "The Walk," a poignant tale that mixes colonialism, sexism, religion, quests and hopelessness--proves her artistry and her ability to powerfully deliver her message. The reader's emotions evoked by her literary works and the questions generated by a first reading often lead to an immediate, second time through her writing.