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University of Hunger: Collected Poems and
Selected Prose,
by Martin Carter, ed. Gemma Robinson (Bloodaxe Books, ISBN
1-85224-710-X, 320 pp)
Review by Nicholas Laughlin
First
published in Caribbean Beat, July/August
2006
For the individual reader, poetry’s true
avoirdupois is known only to the heart’s shivering scales. But how do
we measure a poet’s enduring worth to a society, a nation, a people?
One way is to count his phrases and lines that have entered the common
language, that ordinary men and women have come to think of as their
own, that seem, as all true poetry seems, to have found a way to
express something crucial and otherwise inexpressible. By this standard
there is no West Indian poet, not even Derek Walcott, whose poems have
been so vitally important to so many as Martin Carter’s.
The British literary scholar Stewart Brown tells the story of a reading
Carter gave in London in 1991. Many in the audience were Guyanese
expatriates of no particularly literary bent. “As he read from those
poems,” Brown remembers, “that audience began to recite them with him —
not to read them from a book, but to recite them from memory.” For to
read Carter’s poems is to encounter a sequence of lines that have
become the everyday possessions of many ordinary people in Guyana and
elsewhere in the Caribbean, possessions no less everyday for being
lyrics of rare power and rhythm: “is the university of hunger the wide
waste”; “Death must not find us thinking that we die”; “I come from the
nigger yard of yesterday”.
After his death in 1997, Carter’s work fell not entirely but nearly out
of print. It is a pleasing coincidence that 2006 brings two separate
new editions of his poems. Ian McDonald and Stewart Brown’s Poems by Martin Carter, based on
the text of the 1997 Selected Poems,
will shortly arrive from Macmillan; and University of Hunger: Collected Poems and
Selected Prose, edited by the young British Carter scholar Gemma
Robinson, appeared a few months ago on the list of the eminent poetry
publishers Bloodaxe.
University of Hunger is the
most comprehensive Carter edition yet, collecting 169 poems, including
every one of his published poems and some previously unpublished. It is
scrupulously annotated, providing for each poem information about
surviving manuscripts or typescripts, place and circumstances of first
publication, explication of puzzling references, and major variant
readings, so that the reader can follow a poem’s revisions between
successive appearances in print. Few Caribbean writers have enjoyed
such careful editorial attention, and University
of Hunger will be the definitive Carter for the foreseeable
future. It is usefully fleshed out with a selection of fifteen essays
on anti-colonialism, race, the meaning of nationhood, and art and
literature, and Robinson has written a lively introduction combining
biography with thoughtful literary analysis.
For longtime readers of Carter, this is a chance to engage with the
poems afresh, to see at once the whole shape of the arc of his poetic
career. Carter’s earliest work is still his best known: the flag-waving
poems written in the 1950s around the time of the first electoral
victory of the People’s Progressive Party (of which Carter was then a
member), the short experiment in self-government in pre-independence
British Guiana, the state of emergency of 1953 (when Carter was
arrested) and the occupation of Georgetown by British troops when the
colonial authorities decided the PPP was a Communist threat. The poems
of The Hill of Fire Glows Red
(1951) and Poems of Resistance
(1954) express better than any politician’s speeches the hunger for
freedom that drove the independence activists of British Guiana — and,
for that matter, the rest of the British West Indies. But they also
express a more subtle but no less visceral hunger for
self-understanding — self as human being, as citizen, as poet.
Poems of Resistance from British
Guiana — the full title of the book’s original edition — was
published by Lawrence and Wishart, a prominent firm of left-wing London
publishers, and eventually translated into Russian and Chinese. It won
Carter the reputation of a “political poet”. It’s true that Carter’s
was always, in Gemma Robinson’s phrase, “a poetry of involvement”, but
the “political” badge, attracting some readers and repelling others,
also obscured his real lyrical gifts and the keen spiritual curiosity
that always animated his poems. Early protest poems like “Not I with
This Torn Shirt” and “A Banner for the Revolution” hammered hard at the
bells of social change. Later, quieter poems, like “Our Time”, which
opens his Poems of Affinity
(1980), show us that Carter’s delicate, fine ear was inseparable from
his delicate, fine moral sensibility.
These poems are often angry, often inspiring; just as often they are
puzzling and melancholy. Robinson reminds us that Walcott found in
Carter’s poems a quality he called “tenderness”. It is a good word for
a poet who could describe how “a sweet child smiling with innocence /
still wonders why a frown is not so ugly”. But these poems are never
comforting. The urgency of Carter’s drive to understand the imperfect
world left no room for comfort. +