Excerpt from The Terror and the Time, Rupert Roopnaraine’s 1979 film, including Martin Carter’s reading of his poem “This Is the Dark Time My Love”
Were Martin Carter still alive, he would be eighty-three today. Carter’s life and work have been much on my mind the past months. They offer exemplary matter for contemplation of questions about the place of the Caribbean writer in the world, about literary integrity and seriousness, about the meaning of literary success, and about the shape of contemporary Caribbean poetry.
His birthday seems an apt moment to introduce a new section at the CRB website. Readers may have noticed that the relaunched website includes a subject index page — a work in progress — where reviews and other pieces from the magazine are listed under major subject headings, making it easier to navigate our six-year archive. In the coming months, we plan to expand the subject index with pages dedicated to significant Caribbean writers, where we will list relevant CRB (and Antilles) pieces, along with a selection of interesting links to material online elsewhere.
I’m pleased that our new Martin Carter page is the first. There you’ll find links to Vahni Capildeo’s review of Carter’s Collected Poems from the November 2006 CRB, Stewart Brown’s essay on Carter’s art and legacy from our February 2006 issue, and the selections from Carter’s poetry notebooks that we published in November 2008 — as well as links to reviews and articles in other periodicals, biographical resources, and poems.
I will always be speaking with you. And if I falter,
and if I stop, I will still be speaking with you, in
words that are not uttered, are never uttered, never
made into the green sky, the green earth, the
green, green love . . .
….And I was bathing by the sea and there was a
gull, a white gull, so far, so far . . .
….I saw the weak wing flutter long before it did,
and the webbed foot dip, long before it did; and
the sudden wave, and the scarlet tinted foam of
a sunset burning like fire already gold in flames.(From “Suite of Five Poems”, written in 1961
and first published in 2000 in Kyk-Over-Al)
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for this Nicholas and CRB. I’d love to see the whole film. And I don’t know if I had heard Martin reading like this before. I must have heard him read live, but to hear the strong Guyanese accent on such a well known poem of his, read by him, was..startling…quite moving.
Thanks for this idea of special pages for our special writers. it will be good to see, hear and read them here.
Martin Carter will always be for me the people’s poet. I will never forget the cobbler at Wellington and Robb Sts many years ago reciting by heart from “Poems of Resistance” while I waited for him to fix my shoe.
“Where did you learn this,” I asked, recognizing the poet.
“I didn’t learn it!” The cobbler replied, “it belong to us.”