various national cultures, subcultures and, importantly, tensions had to be formed and, finally, out of that, a national literature. It took a while for that literature to begin, and then a longer while for it to become good.
Derek Walcott from St Lucia, and Kamau Brathwaite from Barbados are seen as the two foremost West Indian poets. Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1992. His work is known for a rootedness in an English/European tradition which he has rightly embraced as an equal part of his heritage. Brathwaite, on the other hand, seems more committed to forging ‘something new’. He famously states ‘the hurricane does not roar in pentameter’, suggesting that an old form would never fit nor adequately represent a new world. He argues for a new rhythm and meter and style. But Walcott as the Western traditionalist, and Brathwaite as the innovative Africanist, are distinctions that are more popular than they are true; any additional reading will complicate these supposed differences, at the same time highlighting many similarities between the two. Still, whether fairly or not, they have come to represent two separate camps in West Indian poetry, and at one point all poets emerging from the region, it seemed, had to choose an allegiance. One of the markers of the eight new Caribbean poets featured here is a refusal to make any such choice, a willingness to be influenced, even significantly, by both, and indeed by a whole host of other poets not necessarily from the Caribbean. Such an expansiveness of influence can only be positive as will be certainly evident in the quality of poetry found here.
Walcott and Brathwaite started publishing in the 1950s and 60s respectively. During that time, and in the twenty years that followed, many other major Caribbean poets emerged: Martin Carter, Grace Nichols, John Agard and Fred D’Aguiar from Guyana, Kendel Hipollyte from St Lucia, Dennis Scott, Mervyn Morris, Lorna Goodison, Olive Senior and Linton Kwesi Johnson from Jamaica, Wayne Brown and Dionne Brand from Trinidad, Merle Collins from Grenada. These names have been inducted into a West Indian literary canon, and as is the case with all canons, scholarship has gone back to them again and again. Unintentionally perhaps, this becomes a kind of gate-keeping – a way to keep those in, safely in. Every once in a while, however, we must look in another, less safe direction. We must look to the noise we have been ignoring – for at the gate other poets are brandishing large stones, banging, trying to get our attention. The more subversive ones are trying to remove the gate altogether. We must look to these poets who lay legitimate claim to a tradition which they are, at the same time, expanding and reinventing. The present anthology introduces eight such who in the past ten years or less have been doing this.
On the back cover of Shara McCallum’s first book, The Water Between Us, there is a disagreement which may begin to support my assertion that influences have become more expansive, and as such, lineages have become x
New Caribbean Poetry
