In The Poetry

from The Video Box: Number 25

If you ask what my favourite programme is
it has to be that strange world jigsaw final.
After the winner had defeated all his rivals
with harder and harder jigsaws, he had to prove his mettle
by completing one last absolute mind crusher
on his own, under the cameras, in less than a week.
We saw, [...]

I suppose, just two words that one might draw attention to. One is Anancyman. Anancy is the spider god that came over from Africa to the Caribbean, and informed so much of our literature; the weakest creature in the forest, who had to get his way by subterfuge and cunning rather than by strength [...]

My Papa’s Waltz

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step [...]

I’m afraid I wasn’t very keen on history at school, so when someone asked me for some poems about the Romans, I was thinking “how can I do this in minimum time?” And I decided to write a history of the Romans in Britain in forty words only.

The Romans in Britain
(A history in 40 [...]

‘From his Childhood’ is a fantasy about a severe governess or nanny remembered from somebody’s early years. A woman full of moral maxims and stern instructions and her influence is destructive though the storyteller has eventually grown out of her. She is not my own nanny or governess – I had no such thing – [...]

I read this poem in Uganda and I presented it as a lament for my sister’s cat, a little kitten that was trained not to go downstairs in the yard because it wasn’t safe, and one day it escaped, went down into the yard and was torn apart by wild dogs. The poem [...]

Yesterday

The day before yesterday
I think I’ll go to school.
I think I’l take a walk
in the local swimming pool.

The T.V.’s broken
so I think I’ll watch the News.
I’ll be going out barefoot
in my sister’s shoes.

I don’t like her
so I call her my friend.
When I leave
I’ll start at the end.

This poem is one unique in my experience that came because of the title – in fact the title came to me first – ‘The Ex-Queen Among the Astronomers’. And that phrase just popped into my head from somewhere and then I tried to work out what she might be like, this ex-queen. The image [...]

‘Ted Hughes is Elvis Presley ‘ is about the fact that I thought that towards the end of his life, Ted Hughes became a bit of a star in that Elvis Presley way, and also I thought I’ve never seen Ted and Elvis in the same room, and perhaps they are the same person.

Ted Hughes [...]

Blues

Those five or six young guys
hunched on the stoop
that oven-hot summer night
whistled me over. Nice
and friendly. So, I stop.
MacDougal or Christopher
Street in chains of light.

A summer festival. Or some
saint’s. I wasn’t too far from
home, but not too bright
for a nigger, and not too dark.
I figured we were all
one, wop, nigger, jew,
besides, this wasn’t Central Park.
I’m [...]