It was through Anson Gonzalez that I met the publisher of my newest book Swallowing the Sky. Anson had co-edited the collection 100 Poems From Trinidad and & Tobago–not the 100 best, necessarily, but poems of a broad range of that represented this country's poetic output.
Shivanee Ramlochan, who reviews books for the little part of the Guardian I edit, the Sunday Arts Section, said of the collection that it was a "valiant, fresh attempt to bring poetry down from the dusty back shelf, and repurpose verses for the time that lies ahead."
She acknowledged it was an uneven collection, and perhaps it's false modesty to say that my youthful poem Identity might not have made the cut otherwise. (After all, there were poets like Eric Roach and Derek Walcott in those pages.)
I wrote Identity when I was just about 17, and Anson published it in his journal The New Voices as it won the 1991 Clico Schools Poetry Writing Competition, which he judged.
At that time I considered myself primarily a poet. Though I wrote fiction and practiced secondary school journalism (I was an editor of the Bishop's institution known as Wall News, a newsletter published on notice boards in the school), it was poetry that had captured my heart from the first line I wrote at about age eight. Right up into my 20s and maybe even my 30s I still considered myself a poet first and foremost.
By the time I met Ian Dieffenthaller, Anson's co-editor of 100 Poems and the book's publisher at Cane Arrow Press, I no longer considered myself that way. Although there were and still are people who love my poems–Pan Man and Dudups especially–I had come to find my poems far less interesting than the work of my peers. Nicholas Laughlin, Andre Bagoo and Anu Lakhan, not to mention Vahni Capildeo and Malika Booker, Vladimir Lucien, Kei Miller and Tanya Shirley–to name some of the contemporary Caribbean poets writing today–all seemed to be writing in a different paradigm of word and image than I was.
But just at the moment when I was about to pretty much bow out as a poet, Ian Dieffenthaller asked me if I would consider doing a collection for Cane Arrow Press. In response, I sent him poems by the bucket, by the truckload, even. These were a combination of very old poems, some written 20 years ago when I was first a UWI student, and newer material that had been written and performed when I was a member of the Ten Sisters collective with Paula Ob� in the Naughties. There were also a few random one-off poems, like the piece the tiniest tabanca, which didn't fall into one of my major writing periods. He went through the lot, discarded some and asked for more. When I was in Grenada as the writer-in-residence at St George's University last year, I resolved to write new work that would complete the collection.
What emerged was a section in the book called Pathology, which is a kind of chronicle of myself, looking at my development in relation to my grandmother and my mother and how our stories intersected and diverged.
The collection on the whole is named after one poem at the back of the book, a poem that talks about eating the whole world. It's a way, for me, of claiming my space and my right to be here, my right to succeed, my right to win.
I'm grateful to Ian for believing in my work and in me, and I'm happy to say the book is now out. It is going to be launched at the NGC Bocas Lit Fest on May 3, with a discussion between me and my old friend and now my lecturer at UWI, Dr Gabrielle Hosein. Sharon Millar, Andre Bagoo and Rhoda Bharath are also part of the Sunday Launch programme with their own new books.
I've already mentioned my high regard for Andre's poetry; I hold Sharon and Rhoda both in equally high esteem. I don't dare hope that my work is anything near to as good as theirs, and am honoured that it is being launched at the same time. Ian won't make it down to Trinidad for Bocas, and Anson is in a hospice in the UK. I wish they could both be here to see what they have given birth to. Writing is a hard, solitary practice and complete self-doubt it is the bane of many a writer. It is truly a gift when someone else looks at your work and says, yes, well done.