“Footnotes” is a series of occasional blog posts giving further information about books reviewed in the CRB

The November 2013 CRB includes a review by Ishion Hutchinson of Edward Baugh’s Black Sand: New and Selected Poems. “Baugh’s brand of poetry,” writes Hutchinson, “has given the quotidian Caribbean experience, and often the unexamined Caribbean life, an exhilarating poetic presence.”

Emeritus professor of the University of the West Indies, Baugh is a leading authority on the work of Derek Walcott — and one of the best readers of Walcott’s poems your Antilles blogger has ever heard. He published the first book-length study of Walcott (Derek Walcott: Memory as Vision, 1978), edited the St Lucian Nobel laureate’s 2007 Selected Poems, and has written copiously on Walcott’s poetry and his influence on Caribbean literature.

Baugh spent much of his career at UWI’s Mona campus, where — with colleagues like Kenneth Ramchand and Mervyn Morris — he helped lay the foundations for serious scholarly consideration of West Indian literature. In particular, Baugh’s 1977 essay “The West Indian Writer and His Quarrel with History” has been recognised by a subsequent generation of scholars as a seminal contribution to Caribbean literary criticism.

At UWI-Mona, Baugh also served as the campus’s public orator. His addresses delivered in this role, detailing the achievements of the university’s honorary graduands, are collected in Chancellor, I Present … (1998), which you can read in part at Google Books.

As Hutchinson notes in his review, though Baugh has been writing poems for five decades, he has not been the most prolific of poets. Nonetheless, “Baugh has patiently created an important oeuvre that is indelible.” His previous books of poems, A Tale from the Rainforest (1988) and It Was the Singing (2000), share with Black Sand the quality Hutchinson describes as “the fluid way in which he moves beyond expression into comprehension, articulating with superb intimacy those echolocations outside of the verbal framework.”

Baugh is also a longtime CRB contributor — for example, reviewing Walcott’s book The Prodigal, Lorna Goodison’s Controlling the Silver, and more recently Vahni Capildeo’s Undraining Sea. The CRB archive also includes an essay by Baugh on Frank Collymore, excerpted from his biography of the late Barbadian writer and editor (which was in turn reviewed in the CRB by John Gilmore).

“For most of my life,” Baugh said in a 2006 Caribbean Beat interview, “people knew me simply as a critic. I was writing poems, getting the odd poem published here and there, but here and abroad, except for a few people who were into poetry, people knew me as a critic.

“I always used to say, half in jest, but only half, that the thing I would most have liked to be in the world is a poet. So the fact that sometimes now people refer to me as poet first is a kind of great thrill to me.”

Listen to Edward Baugh reading several of his poems at The Poetry Archive.

Frank Collymore reading a copy of Bim in his garden.
Photograph courtesy the Estate of Frank A. Collymore

This week the CRB publishes Geoffrey Philp’s review of Patricia Powell’s novel The Fullness of Everything; a new poem, “The Garden”, by Ishion Hutchinson; and John T. Gilmore’s review of Edward Baugh’s new biography of Frank Collymore, the late Barbadian writer and editor of the pioneering journal Bim, described by his biographer as the literary godfather of a generation of West Indian writers.

Some CRB readers may remember that an excerpt from Baugh’s then book-in-progress appeared in our May 2008 issue, with the title “In praise of Colly”. Dipping into the archives and quoting from Collymore’s extensive correspondence, the piece describes his crucial role in encouraging and promoting the early literary careers of George Lamming, Derek Walcott, and other writers who made their debut in the 1940s and 50s. “We should not underrate his own writing,” Baugh says —

relatively minor in the overall scheme of things, but appreciable and significant. However, the more epoch-making achievement was his work with Bim, and Collymore’s Bim-related dealings with so many young men who were to play so great a part in the making of West Indian literature.

Gilmore ends his review of Frank Collymore: A Biography with a plea for a comprehensive new edition of Collymore’s fiction and poems. To which I’d add: it’s high time the Bim archive was fully digitised and made widely available online. If Collymore was West Indian literature’s godfather — an honour he shares with A.J. Seymour of Kyk-Over-Al and Henry Swanzy of Caribbean Voices — then all those back issues of Bim are part of our family history.

During the CRB’s break in publication last year, your Antilles blogger put his head together with two writer friends — Vahni Capildeo and Anu Lakhan — and started a modest little publishing project, the literary and art journal Town. Each issue contains just a few short pieces of writing, poems mostly, and two or three images. Town appears at irregular intervals — roughly, every two or three months — in two formats. We print simple broadside editions, and post them in public locations — on walls, lampposts, inside bookshops, etc. — and each issue also appears online, where readers can download PDFs of the broadsides to make their own physical copies. Town is rooted in Port of Spain, but international in scope: the four issues we’ve published so far have included writers from five continents.

The latest issue, our fourth, is published this week. It features poets from Jamaica, Hungary, Belarus, and Britain — Ishion Hutchinson, Agnes Lehoczky, Valzhyna Mort, and John Whale — and images by a Vincentian artist, Holly Bynoe. Antilles readers in Port of Spain can keep an eye out for the broadsides appearing randomly around the city, and others further afield can find this issue here.