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an’ watch that little sister (Braithwaite) ship ho’n of meager pay (Strachan) Strachan weaves dialect, folksongs and even, if I may co-opt the suggestive term, ‘drumspeak’ into his work, but he does it effortlessly (or so the final product seems): kadak doong doong kakkadak doong doong this is how the eyes begin their easy retreat into the skull how the muscles tighten and then relax how the joints prepare themselves for their starry passengers kadak doong doong dak dak doong doong (‘gods and spirits are summoned through the portal divine’, p. 119) Christian Campbell, another Bahamian, is a prodigious talent. He, more than any of the others, is trying out a variety of voices which range from the folkcentred talk about ‘grandmummy’, to a more world-wise and cynical description of Oxford, to the chant of a rent-a-dread (or is it Ras-titute?) prowling on a Caribbean beach. Even in fixed form his voice is still looking for new shapes. His sonnet, perhaps appropriately, resists the iambic (though not the pentameter) in favour of a rhythm closer to the two speakers’ voices: but he’s Haitian and knows about fleeing. I will get there fast. Learning that only sea bounds us, our islands, he churns loose the sing song of a kweyol-coated tongue. Do you see yourself here for good?, I ask him. All I catch is: No. Port-au-Prince. Night. Stars. You know, la lune. How the stars dive for the dead, then rise. How la lune bellies full as Toussaint’s hope. (‘Repatriation’, p. 51) Campbell is certainly conscious of himself and indeed the Caribbean subject being able to draw from and ‘put on’ various voices as different situations demand: xiv New Caribbean Poetry
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At immigration I put on airs and styles… I look only ahead and walk straight-back, like my grandfather. Speak like he spoke to foreigners. In his best moods, he would put on the mouths of all the Englishmen he’d met, playing the Queen and how she gave him his MBE – Pa. (‘Legba’, p. 45) Delores Gauntlett’s work echoes much that I’ve liked in the American formalist, Robert Hayden. In her poems that feature the figure of a father wrecked by a war, scarred into silence, I often hear, playing in the background, Hayden’s famous ‘Those Winter Sundays’. That poem opens in the reverie of observing a father wake to the ritual of work: Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. Gauntlett’s ‘A Song for My Father’ (p. 24) begins in a similar conceit: Against the yam-vine quiet of the garden a nightingale stirred with my father: the lift and fall of the pickaxe, the heaving throat of the hidden bird exacting the subtleties of song. This would become the memory of high grass. Near the end of Hayden’s poem he cries, ‘What did I know? What did I know!’ It is a lament that appears in Gauntlett’s own work: ‘Though what did I know at eight/ about the bends they crossed’ (‘Pocomania’, p. 34) What Gauntlett shares with Hayden is not only a preference for pentametric lines, but the powerful craft of nostalgia. Gauntlett does not long for the past (as Dionne Brand would put it), steering far away from sentimentality. But what she invokes and evokes so effectively, is a year that has already gone: Now, under these scorched foundation stones, lies the unstirred clay steeped in grandfather’s life: introduction xv

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an’ watch that little sister

(Braithwaite)

ship ho’n of meager pay

(Strachan)

Strachan weaves dialect, folksongs and even, if I may co-opt the suggestive term, ‘drumspeak’ into his work, but he does it effortlessly (or so the final product seems):

kadak doong doong kakkadak doong doong this is how the eyes begin their easy retreat into the skull how the muscles tighten and then relax how the joints prepare themselves for their starry passengers kadak doong doong dak dak doong doong

(‘gods and spirits are summoned through the portal divine’, p. 119)

Christian Campbell, another Bahamian, is a prodigious talent. He, more than any of the others, is trying out a variety of voices which range from the folkcentred talk about ‘grandmummy’, to a more world-wise and cynical description of Oxford, to the chant of a rent-a-dread (or is it Ras-titute?) prowling on a Caribbean beach. Even in fixed form his voice is still looking for new shapes. His sonnet, perhaps appropriately, resists the iambic (though not the pentameter) in favour of a rhythm closer to the two speakers’ voices:

but he’s Haitian and knows about fleeing. I will get there fast. Learning that only sea bounds us, our islands, he churns loose the sing song of a kweyol-coated tongue. Do you see yourself here for good?, I ask him. All I catch is: No. Port-au-Prince. Night. Stars. You know, la lune. How the stars dive for the dead, then rise. How la lune bellies full as Toussaint’s hope.

(‘Repatriation’, p. 51)

Campbell is certainly conscious of himself and indeed the Caribbean subject being able to draw from and ‘put on’ various voices as different situations demand:

xiv

New Caribbean Poetry

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