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Hinterland: Caribbean Poetry from the West Indies and Britain
E.A. Markham’s iconic anthology "Hinterland" opened up new territory for many readers, with its substantial selections by 14 key poets with photos, interviews, essays by the poets themselves. It became a set text for the Open University and at many universities and colleges in Britain and the Caribbean. Since Markham compiled his selection over 30 years ago, the work of the poets he documents has become even more important, historically significant and highly influential. The poets featured – in depth – are Derek Walcott, Martin Carter, Louise Bennett, Kamau Brathwaite, Dennis Scott, James Berry, Mervyn Morris, E.A. Markham, Olive Senior, Grace Nichols, Lorna Goodison, Fred D’Aguiar, Michael Smith and Linton Kwesi Johnson.
‘The product largely of offshore islands – Jamaica, Trinidad, Britain, etc (Guyana being the exception) – West Indian poetry in English has often been located on the fringes of the central experience. Its popularity is widely associated with local colour, linguistic and tonal innovation, thought to be lacking in the English “mainstream”. This collection shows that the most vital and challenging poetry of the British Caribbean heritage is both local in its urgency and informed by a hinterland of experience deeper than the geography of the islands’ politics.’ – E.A. Markham, writing in 1989
‘The product largely of offshore islands – Jamaica, Trinidad, Britain, etc (Guyana being the exception) – West Indian poetry in English has often been located on the fringes of the central experience. Its popularity is widely associated with local colour, linguistic and tonal innovation, thought to be lacking in the English “mainstream”. This collection shows that the most vital and challenging poetry of the British Caribbean heritage is both local in its urgency and informed by a hinterland of experience deeper than the geography of the islands’ politics.’ – E.A. Markham, writing in 1989
- GenresPoetry
336 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
1 person is currently reading
49 people want to read
About the author
E.A. Markham
33 books2 followersEdward Archie Markham FRSL was a poet and writer, born in Harris, Montserrat, and mainly resident in the United Kingdom from 1956. Known for poetry in both "nation-language" (patois) and standard English, for short stories and a comic novel, he sometimes used the pseudonym Paul St. Vincent and other personae, and defies simple classification as an author. He edited two significant collections of Caribbean writing, and several literary magazines. His first work was in drama.
His family was large and relatively prosperous. He attended grammar school in Montserrat, and read English and philosophy at the University of Wales, Lampeter. He started academic research into seventeenth century comedy at the University of East Anglia, and then in London. In 1969, while lecturing at Kilburn Polytechnic, he formed the Caribbean Theatre Troupe, which toured Monserrat, Saint Vincent and other parts of the Eastern Caribbean. They performed The Private Life of the Public Man and Dropping Out is Violence.
He then worked in France for two years. His Lambchops poems, written as Paul St. Vincent, started to appear in the mid-1970s, and assume the perspective of a young urban Caribbean man. He would also use the voices of Sally Goodman, a Welsh feminist, Philpot and Maureen, and the character of Pewter Stapleton, an unimpressive academic, in his novel and stories. He built up a reputation gradually as a poet, through small press and chapbook publication.
He joined for a time the performers The Bluefoot Travellers. In the later 1970s he taught in Manchester, then had writing fellowships in Hull and London (on a C. Day Lewis Fellowship).
In a long itinerant period he took a position for two years 1983-5 in Papua New Guinea, working for Enga province. He followed that with two years editing Artrage, the magazine of the Minority Arts Advisory Service. He spent 1988-91 at the University of Ulster as a writer-in-residence; he edited Writing Ulster.
He also lived in Germany and Sweden, and in Britain, in Ipswich and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He served in both the Poetry Society and Poetry Book Society.
He was awarded the Certificate of Honour by the Government of Montserrat, in 1997.
As Professor of Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University, a position he held until his death, he directed the Hallam Literature Festival. He also edited Sheffield Thursday magazine, and ran its competitions for poetry and short stories.
Markham died of a heart attack in Paris on Easter day, 23 March 2008, at the age of 69
His family was large and relatively prosperous. He attended grammar school in Montserrat, and read English and philosophy at the University of Wales, Lampeter. He started academic research into seventeenth century comedy at the University of East Anglia, and then in London. In 1969, while lecturing at Kilburn Polytechnic, he formed the Caribbean Theatre Troupe, which toured Monserrat, Saint Vincent and other parts of the Eastern Caribbean. They performed The Private Life of the Public Man and Dropping Out is Violence.
He then worked in France for two years. His Lambchops poems, written as Paul St. Vincent, started to appear in the mid-1970s, and assume the perspective of a young urban Caribbean man. He would also use the voices of Sally Goodman, a Welsh feminist, Philpot and Maureen, and the character of Pewter Stapleton, an unimpressive academic, in his novel and stories. He built up a reputation gradually as a poet, through small press and chapbook publication.
He joined for a time the performers The Bluefoot Travellers. In the later 1970s he taught in Manchester, then had writing fellowships in Hull and London (on a C. Day Lewis Fellowship).
In a long itinerant period he took a position for two years 1983-5 in Papua New Guinea, working for Enga province. He followed that with two years editing Artrage, the magazine of the Minority Arts Advisory Service. He spent 1988-91 at the University of Ulster as a writer-in-residence; he edited Writing Ulster.
He also lived in Germany and Sweden, and in Britain, in Ipswich and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He served in both the Poetry Society and Poetry Book Society.
He was awarded the Certificate of Honour by the Government of Montserrat, in 1997.
As Professor of Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University, a position he held until his death, he directed the Hallam Literature Festival. He also edited Sheffield Thursday magazine, and ran its competitions for poetry and short stories.
Markham died of a heart attack in Paris on Easter day, 23 March 2008, at the age of 69
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 31, 2021
I think you can learn so much you need to know about Caribbean history in this book, and the poetry is dense, light, sublime, mundane, all the things. I was struck buy something that was written about another book, but a reviewer said, how impoverished the world would be if we just listened to all the same stories and wrote the same things without delving into the joy and pain of global artists. I have been given an amazing opportunity for a few weeks in Antigua, and read this to start to think about this part of the world I was not aware of; and it was perfect. There is a lot of political poetry and poetry written in different dialects or creoles that required work and pain as their experience of slavery and colonialism is more raw, more recent and as problematic as the United States’ relationship to race and racism, and I am so grateful to know more. I was looking for nature themes also, as always, to know the land, and found that also.
***
Fred D’Aguire
Airy Hall Iconography
The Mango traps the sun by degrees,
Transforms its rays into ambrosia.
The Coconut’s perfect seal lets in rain,
Bends with solid milk and honey.
The Guava is its own harvest,
Each seed bound in fleshy juice.
Oracle Mama Dot
I am seated at her bare feet.
The rocking chair on floorboards
Of the verandah is the repeated break
Of bracken underfoot. Where are we heading?
Who dare speak in the moments before dark?
The firefly threads its infinite Morse;
Crickets are mounting a cacophony;
The laughter of daredevil bats.
Dusk thickens into night.
She has rocked and rocked herself to sleep.
She may hold silence for another millennium.
I see the first stars among cloud.
***
Grace Nichols
Even in dreams i will submerge myself
Swimming like one possessed
Back and forth over the course
Stewing it with sweet smelling
Flowers
One for everyone who made the journey.
The Caribbean embraces so much
If you say you are a Caribbean poets
It’s like saying you are poet of the world.
For psychically, you are at once connected
To Africa
Europe,
Asia,
and the Americas.
***
Linton Kwesi Johnson
Reggae Sounds
Shock-black bubble-doun-beat bouncing
Rock-wise tumble-down sound music;
Foot-drop find drum, blood story,
Bass history is a moving...a hurting black story.
Thunda from a bass drum sounding
Lightning from a trumpet and a organ,
Bass and rhythm and trumpet double-up,
Team up with drums for a deep doun searching.
Slow drop, make stop, move forward.
Dig doun to the root of pain...
***
Lorna Goodison
This hymn
Is for the must-be-blessed
The victims of the world
Who know salt best
The world tribe
Of the dispossessed
Outside the halls of plenty
Looking in
This is the benediction
This a hymn.
HEARTEASE
We have no talent for cartography
Always asking
How far is to heartease?
And they say,
Just round the corner.
But that being the spider’s direction
Means each day finds us further away.
Dem stick wi up
Dem jook wi down
And when dem no find
What dem come fi find
Them blood we and say
‘Walk wid more next time.’
So, take up divining again
And go inna interpretation
And believe the flat truth
Left to dry on our tongues.
Truth say,
Heartease distance
Cannot hold in a measure
It say
Travel light
You are the treasure.
It say
You can read maps
Believe, believe
And believe this
The eye know how far
Heartease is.
___________________
For I’ve been planted long
In a sere dry place
Watered only occasionally
With odd overflows
From a passing cloud’s face.
In my morning
I imitated the bougainvilleas
(In appearance
I’m hybrid)
I gave forth defiant alleluia
Of flowering
Covered my aridity with
Red petalled blisters
Grouped close, from far
They were a borealis of
Save-face flowers.
In the middle of my
life span
My trunk’s not so limber,
My sap flows thicker
My region has posted signs
That speak of scarce water.
In this noon of my orchard
Send me deep rain.
***
Keith Jarrett- Rainmaker
Piano man,
My roots are African
I dwell in the centre of the sun.
I am used to its warmth
I am used to its heat
I am seared by its vengeance
(It has a vengeful streak)
So, my prayers are usually
For rain.
My people are farmers
And artists and sometimes the lines
Blur
So a painting becomes a
December of sorrel
A carving heads like a yam hill
Or a song of redemption wings
Like the petals of resurrection
Lilies- all these require rain.
So this Sunday
When my walk misses
My son’s balance on my hips
I’ll be all right if you pull down
For me
Waterfalls of rain.
I never thought a piano
Could be divine
But I’m hearing you this morning
And right on time
It’s drizzling now
I’ll open the curtains and
Watch the lightning conduct
Your hands.
***
Olive Senior
R
A
I
N
Rain
Fall
Scatters
The
Playing
Children
With
The
Cutting
edge
Of
R
A
I
N
D
R
O
P
S
hiro
shima’s children
Also played
Until white
R C
A A
I M
N e
Trench town. Children play.
Trench town. Children play.
Bullets hail down
Bullets hail down
Bullets hail down
_____________
Our road led to places on maps
Places that travelled people
Knew. Our river, undocumented
Was mystery.
My father said: lines on paper
Cannot change something that is.
My mother said, such a wasted
Life is his.
Listen child, said my mother
Whose hands plundered photo albums
of the black ancestors: Herein
Your ancestry, your imagery, your pride.
Choose this river, this rhythm, this road.
Walk good in the footsteps of these fathers.
Listen child, said my father
From the quicksand of his life:
Study rivers. Learn everything.
Rivers may find beginnings
In the clefts of separate mountains
Yet all find their true homes
In the salt of one sea.
____________
In Cockpit Country
The hours form slowly like stalagmites
A bird sings
Pure note
I-hold-my-breath
The world turns and
Turns
I mountain goat plunged
Headlong into this world
With eyes wide open
(Dreaming so)
Blinded by flame trees
And sunlight on river
***
Edward Kamau Brathwaite
I applied for work in London, Cambridge, Ceylon, New Delhi, Kairo...i was a West Indian, rootless man of the world. I could go, belong, everywhere on the worldwide globe. I ended up in a village in Ghana. SLowly, slowly, ever so slowly but surely, I was coming to an awareness of the place of the individual within the tribe, in society. Slowly, slowly, ever so slowly, I came to the sense of identification of myself with these people, my living diviners, the bridge of of my mind now linking Atlantic and ancestor, homeland and heartland. When I turned to leave, there was something wider ore subtle, more tentative, the self without ego, without I, without arrogance....and i came home to find I had not really left. That it was still Africa, Africa in the Caribbean. The problem now was how to relate this new awareness. How can a writer speak about “the people” when those to whom he refers have no such concept of themselves?
Jah
Nairobi’s male elephants uncurl
Their trumpets to heaven
Toot-toot takes it up
In Havana
In Harlem
Bridges of sound curve
Through the pale rigging
Of saxophone stops
The ship sails...
With my blue note, my cracked note, full flattened
Fifth, my ten bebop fingers, my black bottomed strut,
Work song, cabin, hut,
My new frigged-up soul and God’s heaven,
Heaven, gonna walk all over God’s heaven
I furl away from the trumpet
My bridge stops in New York air,
Elevator speeds me to angels
Heaven sways in the reinforced girders
God is glass with his type-
writer teeth, gospel
Jumps and pings off the white
Paper, higher and higher
Up through the hummingbird trees, guitar strings, eyrie;
The buffaloes’ boom through the dust plains,
The antelopes sniff at the water, eland’s sudden hurl
Through the the hurdle of fire, runnels upwards to them
Through the hoof of the world.
But here God looks out over the river
Yellow mix of the neon lights
High up over the crouching cotton-wool green
And we float, high up over the sights of the city
Like fish in a gold water world.
__________
Rome burns
And our slavery begins
In the alps
oven of Europe
Glacier of god
chads opposite
Industry was envisioned here in the indomitable glitter
It out proportions the Parthenon
The colosseum is not be compared with it
Nor dome, nor london bridge, Bernini bronze not Donatello marble
There is more wealth here than with the bankers of amsterdam
More power than in any Boulder dam of heaven
Volt crackle and electricity has invented
Buchenwald Nagasaki and napalm.
It is the frozen first atomic bomb
It’s factories blaze forth bergs and avalanches
The unships sail down Rhine down Rhône down po down dan down Tiber
To the Black Sea dead to the world to red seas of isaias
Without it the Sahara would have been water
Carthage Tunis would have been dolphin towns
Genoa would become a finchal of the esquimaux
Columbus would have sailed south along the Congo’s rivers
_________
Kingston is the Kingdom of this World
The wind blows on the hillside
And i suffer the little children
I remember the lilies of the field
The fish swim in their shoals of silence
Our flung nets are high wet clouds, drifting
With this reed I make music
With this pen I remember the world
With these lips i can remember the beginning of the world
***
DEREK WOLCOTT
For the Altar-piece of the Roseau Valley Church, St. Lucia
The chapel, as the pivot of the valley,
Round which whatever is rooted loosely turns
Men, women, ditches, the revolving fields
Of bananas, the secondary roads,
Draws all to it, to the altar
And the massive altar-piece;
Like a dull mirror, life
Repeated there,
The common life outside.
This is a rich valley,
It is fat with things.
Two earth brown laborers
Dance the botay in it, the drums sound
Under the earth, the heavy foot.
It’s roads radiate like aisles from the altar towards
Those acres of bananas, towards
Leaf-crowded mountains
Rain-bellied clouds
In haze, in iron heat.
Five centuries ago
In the time of Giotto
This altar might have had
In one corner, when God was young
ST. OMER FECIT...GLORIA DEI
It is signed with music.
It turns the whole island
You have to imagine it empty of a Sunday afternoon
Between adorations.
Nobody can see it and it is there,
Nobody adores the two who could be Adam and Eve dancing
After five thousand novenas
And the idea of the Virgin
Coming and going like a little lamp
After all that, you a faith like a canoe at evening coming in,
So that from time to time, on Sundays
Between adorations, one might see,
If one were there, and not there,
Looking in at the windows
The real faces of angels.
_______________
An old lady writes me in a spidery style
Each character trembling, and I see a veined hand
Pellucid as paper, traveling on a skein
Of such frail thoughts its threats is often broken;
Or else the filament from which a phrase is hung
Dims to my sense, but caught, it shines like steel,
The strength of one frail hand in a dim room
Somewhere in Brooklyn, patient and assured,
Restores my sacred to the Word.
Home, home, she can write, with such short time to live;
Alone as she spins the blessings of her years;
Not withered of beauty if she can bring such tears,
Nor withdrawn from the world that breaks its lovers so;
Heaven is to her the place where painters go,
All who bring beauty on frail shell or horn,
There all made, thence their world light drawn,
Drawn, drawn, till the thread is resilience steel,
Lost though it seems in darkening periods,
And there they return to do work that is God’s.
_______________
My Hand in Yours
As in sleep, my hand in yours, yours
In mine. Your voice in my hearing
And memory, like the sound of stars
As they shine, not content with light
only. My fingertips walk on your face
Gently. They tiptoe as a dream does
Away from sleep into waking. In a tree
Somewhere a bird calls out. And i wake up
My hand still in yours, in the midst
of the sound of stars and a far bird.
___________
The Great Dark
Orbiting, the sun itself has a sun
As the moon on earth, a man a mind.
And life is not a matter of a mother only,
It is also a question of the probability of the spirit,
Strength of the web of the ever weaving weaver...
And the linked power of love holds the restless wind
Even though the sky shudders, and life orbits
Around time, around death, it holds the restless whine
As each might hold each other was might hold each other.
***
Martin Carter
University of Hunger
Is the university of hunger the wide waste.
Is the pilgrimage of man the long march.
The print of hunger wanders in the land.
The green tree bends above the long forgotten.
The plains of life rise up and fall in spasms.
Over the shining mud the moon is blood
Falling on ocean at the fence of lights-
My course I set, I give my sail the wind
To navigate the island of the stars
Till I collect my scattered skeleton
Till I collect...
I walk slowly in the wind
Knowing myself in every moving thing
In years and days and words that mean so much
I walk slowly in the wind
I hear my footsteps echoing down the tide
Echoing like a wave on the sand or a wing on the wind
Echoing echoing
A voice in the soul, a laugh in the funny silence.
I walk slowly in the wind.
I walk because I cannot crawl or fly.
_____________
Trying with words to purify myself
I made a line at simply can’t remember.
...it should have been a line with nouns and verbs
Like truth and love and hope and happiness
But looking round it seems I was mistaken
To substitute a temple for a shop.
To see a shop and dream of holy temples
Is to expect a toad to sing a song
And yet, who knows, someone may turn translator
When all these biped reptiles crawl again.
In an case it is not good to show
The nature of the silence of the heart
To talk is just as easy as to walk
And laughter can be one of a thousand kinds.
In great silence I hear approaching rain:
I wish the world would sink and drown again
So that we build Noah’s ark
And send another little dove to find
What we have lost in floods of misery.
***
Louise Bennet
What joyful news, Miss Mattie;
Ah feel like me heart gwine burs-
Jamaica people colonizin
Englan in reverse.
By de hundred, By de tousan
From country an from town
By de ship-load, by de plane-load,
Jamaica is English boun.
For when dem catch an Englan
An start play dem different role
...what a devilment a Englan!
Dem face a war an brave de worse;
But ah wonderin how dem gwine Stan
Colonizin in reverse.
***
Fred D’Aguire
Airy Hall Iconography
The Mango traps the sun by degrees,
Transforms its rays into ambrosia.
The Coconut’s perfect seal lets in rain,
Bends with solid milk and honey.
The Guava is its own harvest,
Each seed bound in fleshy juice.
Oracle Mama Dot
I am seated at her bare feet.
The rocking chair on floorboards
Of the verandah is the repeated break
Of bracken underfoot. Where are we heading?
Who dare speak in the moments before dark?
The firefly threads its infinite Morse;
Crickets are mounting a cacophony;
The laughter of daredevil bats.
Dusk thickens into night.
She has rocked and rocked herself to sleep.
She may hold silence for another millennium.
I see the first stars among cloud.
***
Grace Nichols
Even in dreams i will submerge myself
Swimming like one possessed
Back and forth over the course
Stewing it with sweet smelling
Flowers
One for everyone who made the journey.
The Caribbean embraces so much
If you say you are a Caribbean poets
It’s like saying you are poet of the world.
For psychically, you are at once connected
To Africa
Europe,
Asia,
and the Americas.
***
Linton Kwesi Johnson
Reggae Sounds
Shock-black bubble-doun-beat bouncing
Rock-wise tumble-down sound music;
Foot-drop find drum, blood story,
Bass history is a moving...a hurting black story.
Thunda from a bass drum sounding
Lightning from a trumpet and a organ,
Bass and rhythm and trumpet double-up,
Team up with drums for a deep doun searching.
Slow drop, make stop, move forward.
Dig doun to the root of pain...
***
Lorna Goodison
This hymn
Is for the must-be-blessed
The victims of the world
Who know salt best
The world tribe
Of the dispossessed
Outside the halls of plenty
Looking in
This is the benediction
This a hymn.
HEARTEASE
We have no talent for cartography
Always asking
How far is to heartease?
And they say,
Just round the corner.
But that being the spider’s direction
Means each day finds us further away.
Dem stick wi up
Dem jook wi down
And when dem no find
What dem come fi find
Them blood we and say
‘Walk wid more next time.’
So, take up divining again
And go inna interpretation
And believe the flat truth
Left to dry on our tongues.
Truth say,
Heartease distance
Cannot hold in a measure
It say
Travel light
You are the treasure.
It say
You can read maps
Believe, believe
And believe this
The eye know how far
Heartease is.
___________________
For I’ve been planted long
In a sere dry place
Watered only occasionally
With odd overflows
From a passing cloud’s face.
In my morning
I imitated the bougainvilleas
(In appearance
I’m hybrid)
I gave forth defiant alleluia
Of flowering
Covered my aridity with
Red petalled blisters
Grouped close, from far
They were a borealis of
Save-face flowers.
In the middle of my
life span
My trunk’s not so limber,
My sap flows thicker
My region has posted signs
That speak of scarce water.
In this noon of my orchard
Send me deep rain.
***
Keith Jarrett- Rainmaker
Piano man,
My roots are African
I dwell in the centre of the sun.
I am used to its warmth
I am used to its heat
I am seared by its vengeance
(It has a vengeful streak)
So, my prayers are usually
For rain.
My people are farmers
And artists and sometimes the lines
Blur
So a painting becomes a
December of sorrel
A carving heads like a yam hill
Or a song of redemption wings
Like the petals of resurrection
Lilies- all these require rain.
So this Sunday
When my walk misses
My son’s balance on my hips
I’ll be all right if you pull down
For me
Waterfalls of rain.
I never thought a piano
Could be divine
But I’m hearing you this morning
And right on time
It’s drizzling now
I’ll open the curtains and
Watch the lightning conduct
Your hands.
***
Olive Senior
R
A
I
N
Rain
Fall
Scatters
The
Playing
Children
With
The
Cutting
edge
Of
R
A
I
N
D
R
O
P
S
hiro
shima’s children
Also played
Until white
R C
A A
I M
N e
Trench town. Children play.
Trench town. Children play.
Bullets hail down
Bullets hail down
Bullets hail down
_____________
Our road led to places on maps
Places that travelled people
Knew. Our river, undocumented
Was mystery.
My father said: lines on paper
Cannot change something that is.
My mother said, such a wasted
Life is his.
Listen child, said my mother
Whose hands plundered photo albums
of the black ancestors: Herein
Your ancestry, your imagery, your pride.
Choose this river, this rhythm, this road.
Walk good in the footsteps of these fathers.
Listen child, said my father
From the quicksand of his life:
Study rivers. Learn everything.
Rivers may find beginnings
In the clefts of separate mountains
Yet all find their true homes
In the salt of one sea.
____________
In Cockpit Country
The hours form slowly like stalagmites
A bird sings
Pure note
I-hold-my-breath
The world turns and
Turns
I mountain goat plunged
Headlong into this world
With eyes wide open
(Dreaming so)
Blinded by flame trees
And sunlight on river
***
Edward Kamau Brathwaite
I applied for work in London, Cambridge, Ceylon, New Delhi, Kairo...i was a West Indian, rootless man of the world. I could go, belong, everywhere on the worldwide globe. I ended up in a village in Ghana. SLowly, slowly, ever so slowly but surely, I was coming to an awareness of the place of the individual within the tribe, in society. Slowly, slowly, ever so slowly, I came to the sense of identification of myself with these people, my living diviners, the bridge of of my mind now linking Atlantic and ancestor, homeland and heartland. When I turned to leave, there was something wider ore subtle, more tentative, the self without ego, without I, without arrogance....and i came home to find I had not really left. That it was still Africa, Africa in the Caribbean. The problem now was how to relate this new awareness. How can a writer speak about “the people” when those to whom he refers have no such concept of themselves?
Jah
Nairobi’s male elephants uncurl
Their trumpets to heaven
Toot-toot takes it up
In Havana
In Harlem
Bridges of sound curve
Through the pale rigging
Of saxophone stops
The ship sails...
With my blue note, my cracked note, full flattened
Fifth, my ten bebop fingers, my black bottomed strut,
Work song, cabin, hut,
My new frigged-up soul and God’s heaven,
Heaven, gonna walk all over God’s heaven
I furl away from the trumpet
My bridge stops in New York air,
Elevator speeds me to angels
Heaven sways in the reinforced girders
God is glass with his type-
writer teeth, gospel
Jumps and pings off the white
Paper, higher and higher
Up through the hummingbird trees, guitar strings, eyrie;
The buffaloes’ boom through the dust plains,
The antelopes sniff at the water, eland’s sudden hurl
Through the the hurdle of fire, runnels upwards to them
Through the hoof of the world.
But here God looks out over the river
Yellow mix of the neon lights
High up over the crouching cotton-wool green
And we float, high up over the sights of the city
Like fish in a gold water world.
__________
Rome burns
And our slavery begins
In the alps
oven of Europe
Glacier of god
chads opposite
Industry was envisioned here in the indomitable glitter
It out proportions the Parthenon
The colosseum is not be compared with it
Nor dome, nor london bridge, Bernini bronze not Donatello marble
There is more wealth here than with the bankers of amsterdam
More power than in any Boulder dam of heaven
Volt crackle and electricity has invented
Buchenwald Nagasaki and napalm.
It is the frozen first atomic bomb
It’s factories blaze forth bergs and avalanches
The unships sail down Rhine down Rhône down po down dan down Tiber
To the Black Sea dead to the world to red seas of isaias
Without it the Sahara would have been water
Carthage Tunis would have been dolphin towns
Genoa would become a finchal of the esquimaux
Columbus would have sailed south along the Congo’s rivers
_________
Kingston is the Kingdom of this World
The wind blows on the hillside
And i suffer the little children
I remember the lilies of the field
The fish swim in their shoals of silence
Our flung nets are high wet clouds, drifting
With this reed I make music
With this pen I remember the world
With these lips i can remember the beginning of the world
***
DEREK WOLCOTT
For the Altar-piece of the Roseau Valley Church, St. Lucia
The chapel, as the pivot of the valley,
Round which whatever is rooted loosely turns
Men, women, ditches, the revolving fields
Of bananas, the secondary roads,
Draws all to it, to the altar
And the massive altar-piece;
Like a dull mirror, life
Repeated there,
The common life outside.
This is a rich valley,
It is fat with things.
Two earth brown laborers
Dance the botay in it, the drums sound
Under the earth, the heavy foot.
It’s roads radiate like aisles from the altar towards
Those acres of bananas, towards
Leaf-crowded mountains
Rain-bellied clouds
In haze, in iron heat.
Five centuries ago
In the time of Giotto
This altar might have had
In one corner, when God was young
ST. OMER FECIT...GLORIA DEI
It is signed with music.
It turns the whole island
You have to imagine it empty of a Sunday afternoon
Between adorations.
Nobody can see it and it is there,
Nobody adores the two who could be Adam and Eve dancing
After five thousand novenas
And the idea of the Virgin
Coming and going like a little lamp
After all that, you a faith like a canoe at evening coming in,
So that from time to time, on Sundays
Between adorations, one might see,
If one were there, and not there,
Looking in at the windows
The real faces of angels.
_______________
An old lady writes me in a spidery style
Each character trembling, and I see a veined hand
Pellucid as paper, traveling on a skein
Of such frail thoughts its threats is often broken;
Or else the filament from which a phrase is hung
Dims to my sense, but caught, it shines like steel,
The strength of one frail hand in a dim room
Somewhere in Brooklyn, patient and assured,
Restores my sacred to the Word.
Home, home, she can write, with such short time to live;
Alone as she spins the blessings of her years;
Not withered of beauty if she can bring such tears,
Nor withdrawn from the world that breaks its lovers so;
Heaven is to her the place where painters go,
All who bring beauty on frail shell or horn,
There all made, thence their world light drawn,
Drawn, drawn, till the thread is resilience steel,
Lost though it seems in darkening periods,
And there they return to do work that is God’s.
_______________
My Hand in Yours
As in sleep, my hand in yours, yours
In mine. Your voice in my hearing
And memory, like the sound of stars
As they shine, not content with light
only. My fingertips walk on your face
Gently. They tiptoe as a dream does
Away from sleep into waking. In a tree
Somewhere a bird calls out. And i wake up
My hand still in yours, in the midst
of the sound of stars and a far bird.
___________
The Great Dark
Orbiting, the sun itself has a sun
As the moon on earth, a man a mind.
And life is not a matter of a mother only,
It is also a question of the probability of the spirit,
Strength of the web of the ever weaving weaver...
And the linked power of love holds the restless wind
Even though the sky shudders, and life orbits
Around time, around death, it holds the restless whine
As each might hold each other was might hold each other.
***
Martin Carter
University of Hunger
Is the university of hunger the wide waste.
Is the pilgrimage of man the long march.
The print of hunger wanders in the land.
The green tree bends above the long forgotten.
The plains of life rise up and fall in spasms.
Over the shining mud the moon is blood
Falling on ocean at the fence of lights-
My course I set, I give my sail the wind
To navigate the island of the stars
Till I collect my scattered skeleton
Till I collect...
I walk slowly in the wind
Knowing myself in every moving thing
In years and days and words that mean so much
I walk slowly in the wind
I hear my footsteps echoing down the tide
Echoing like a wave on the sand or a wing on the wind
Echoing echoing
A voice in the soul, a laugh in the funny silence.
I walk slowly in the wind.
I walk because I cannot crawl or fly.
_____________
Trying with words to purify myself
I made a line at simply can’t remember.
...it should have been a line with nouns and verbs
Like truth and love and hope and happiness
But looking round it seems I was mistaken
To substitute a temple for a shop.
To see a shop and dream of holy temples
Is to expect a toad to sing a song
And yet, who knows, someone may turn translator
When all these biped reptiles crawl again.
In an case it is not good to show
The nature of the silence of the heart
To talk is just as easy as to walk
And laughter can be one of a thousand kinds.
In great silence I hear approaching rain:
I wish the world would sink and drown again
So that we build Noah’s ark
And send another little dove to find
What we have lost in floods of misery.
***
Louise Bennet
What joyful news, Miss Mattie;
Ah feel like me heart gwine burs-
Jamaica people colonizin
Englan in reverse.
By de hundred, By de tousan
From country an from town
By de ship-load, by de plane-load,
Jamaica is English boun.
For when dem catch an Englan
An start play dem different role
...what a devilment a Englan!
Dem face a war an brave de worse;
But ah wonderin how dem gwine Stan
Colonizin in reverse.
June 15, 2015
Markham provides a selection of Caribbean poems in the anthology, Hinterland, with either an interview or essay by the poet. I was happy to see that Louise Bennett was included in this anthology and recognized Louise Bennett's most popular poem "Colonisation in Reverse" p.62.
"What a joyful news, Miss Mattie;
Ah feel like me heart gwine burs -"
Yes, my heart did burst with joy seeing Louise Bennett in the anthology as she stated in her interview with Dennis Scott
"...I have been set apart by other creative writers a long time ago because of the language I speak and work in. From the beginning nobody ever recognised me as a writer...."
Other recognizable names were Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Dennis Scott and Derek Walcott who I was surprised to find out is a Van Gogh fan too by his poem "Self-Portrait" p. 94.
I was introduced to other poets:
Martin Carter from Guyana
James Berry from Jamaica
E.A. Markham from Monsterrat
Oliver Senior from Jamaica
Lorna Goodison from Jamaica
Liston Kwesi Johnson from Jamaica
Michael Smith from Jamaica
Grace Nichols from Guyana
Fred D'Aguiar born in London of Guyanese parents
Since my exposure to literature did not include much Caribbean poets, this book is great. It has an accompaniment to the selection of poems either an interview or essay that provides historical, political and biographical data during the period when the poem was written.
Dennis Scott had an interesting definition of poetry where the poem is an attempt to come to terms with a personae and "the healthy self is an integrated collection of various personae." I liked his poem "Weather Report" p.144 very descriptive about the actions of the cat.
"It makes a river of muscle
into the air,
pouring
across the floor."
When I read "Uncle Time" p.151, thoughts were triggered about Anansi whose stories I learnt as a youth.
Mervyn Morris' "Love Story" captured the tough man succumbing to lust but running from love. He seemed to languor in the male-female relationship and their meaning in different stages and situations.
While Martin Carter's poetry seemed revolutionary and political.
Finally the meaning of Hinterland. A poem also titled by E.A. Markham p.208-209
"...London was like a parents'
Home from which to rebel."
There is so much to gain from a re-read which is in order.
"What a joyful news, Miss Mattie;
Ah feel like me heart gwine burs -"
Yes, my heart did burst with joy seeing Louise Bennett in the anthology as she stated in her interview with Dennis Scott
"...I have been set apart by other creative writers a long time ago because of the language I speak and work in. From the beginning nobody ever recognised me as a writer...."
Other recognizable names were Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Dennis Scott and Derek Walcott who I was surprised to find out is a Van Gogh fan too by his poem "Self-Portrait" p. 94.
I was introduced to other poets:
Martin Carter from Guyana
James Berry from Jamaica
E.A. Markham from Monsterrat
Oliver Senior from Jamaica
Lorna Goodison from Jamaica
Liston Kwesi Johnson from Jamaica
Michael Smith from Jamaica
Grace Nichols from Guyana
Fred D'Aguiar born in London of Guyanese parents
Since my exposure to literature did not include much Caribbean poets, this book is great. It has an accompaniment to the selection of poems either an interview or essay that provides historical, political and biographical data during the period when the poem was written.
Dennis Scott had an interesting definition of poetry where the poem is an attempt to come to terms with a personae and "the healthy self is an integrated collection of various personae." I liked his poem "Weather Report" p.144 very descriptive about the actions of the cat.
"It makes a river of muscle
into the air,
pouring
across the floor."
When I read "Uncle Time" p.151, thoughts were triggered about Anansi whose stories I learnt as a youth.
Mervyn Morris' "Love Story" captured the tough man succumbing to lust but running from love. He seemed to languor in the male-female relationship and their meaning in different stages and situations.
While Martin Carter's poetry seemed revolutionary and political.
Finally the meaning of Hinterland. A poem also titled by E.A. Markham p.208-209
"...London was like a parents'
Home from which to rebel."
There is so much to gain from a re-read which is in order.
February 1, 2024
I'd have liked a few more poems and shorter introductions to each poet.
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