A lagniappe of any kind is always welcome, especially when unanticipated.
The recently published Poems of Sam Selvon provides both a posthumous literary lagniappe for one of the Anglophone Caribbean's seminal novelists and a delightful surprise for most readers to discover that Selvon was a poet before he turned fulltime prose fiction, drama and screenplay-writer.
It's almost as though Moses, the procrastinating, shrewd Anancyesque protagonist of The Lonely Londoners, has slipped this slim anthology into circulation, just to remind us he's still ascending.
But mercurial Moses had some excellent backup in the kingdom of this world, manifest in the not inconsiderable shape and light-handed erudition of the anthology's editor, Dr Roydon Salick.
A Selvon scholar and friend, Salick is to be congratulated on his meticulous research, which resulted in his unearthing 12 previously unpublished poems and also on his copious notes, which make reading and interpretation so fulfilling, whilst providing invaluable insights into a young writer's development. As Prof Ken Ramchand, doyen of Caribbean literary criticism, notes in the foreword: "This is a historic publishing moment."
What immediately strikes the reader who only knows Selvon the novelist are the absence of his characteristic sardonic humour and the modified Creole voice now regarded as almost synonymous with Selvon.
What we find instead, among the earliest crop of poems, published in the Trinidad Guardian from December 1946 onwards, is the self-conscious (if unconscious) reproduction of sometimes archaic poetic language (Now 'tis empty...how oft my lonely lips did pass...do not stand sylph-like...every limb 'twixt earth and sky) and the thematic influences of some of the major poets in the English canon: the Metaphysicals, the Romantics (especially Wordsworth), Tennyson and Browning, WB Yeats and TS Eliot.
For an aspiring writer in the mid- to late 1940s environment of British colonial Trinidad, these models would have been unavoidable. It seems unlikely that the young Selvon knew the work of Martinique's Aime Cesaire or Cuba's Nicolas Guillen, which might have been more beneficial in developing a non-Eurocentric voice.
If it is difficult to discern the mature Selvon in these early voices, we can find preliminary sketches of some of the themes which dominated his later work: love, requited or not; humanity's relationship with infinity; the creative process versus lived experience.
It's impossible to ignore the hand of TS Eliot, (cf Burnt Norton, Four Quartets) in one of the very early meditations on the vicissitudes of writing, lived versus processed experience: "Nothing in the end, and there is no beginning,/Future is now –each second ahead/Lived before grasped."
In Consolation, which if we follow Salick's categorisation of Selvon's poetic themes (love, nature, existentialist, the creative process) would straddle the existentialist and creative process, we find the same perplexity, which Moses struggles to resolve in Lonely Londoners: "So perhaps with life/This split-second existence/In the eternity of Time/Might be the first reaction,/And when we die, will come/Wiser realms, soberer thoughts-/The truth of life."
If the young poet is self-conscious in attempting traditional poetic themes, in similar style to a would-be concert pianist improvising on a Chopin prelude, the most successful of the very early poems, in terms of hearing Selvon's "poetic" voice rather than echoes of mentors, are the two poems he wrote for his first wife, in which he temporarily abandons Mount Parnassus for Tacarigua: "And a home, a bed for two;/Blazing-flowered garden...Not the greatest love story/But humble life with you."
Another refreshing local gem can be retrieved from Modern Art in which Selvon takes an outsider's peek at western Modernism ("The jumble mud, crossword puzzles") and with the subversive humour which would become his hallmark juxtaposes high seriousness with the extemporising pedantry of a Pierrot Grenade: "One poet says, looking at his effort/ 'A knife and a fork/A bottle and a cork/That's the way to spell New York.'/Another colour-stained writer of verse/Looks at his strenuous work/His masterpiece of nothingness/ And says softly and madly:/'A chicken in a car/And the car can't go/That's the way to spell Chicago.'"
Federation, dated 1949, finds Selvon in prescient mode ("what/lies scheming in the future's mouth/is anybody's guess...we can only not hope for a sudden explosion/of disappointment which will scatter us back/In steps from the equator") while another cluster of poems (Sun, Poem in London and Discovering Tropic) mark the emergence of a maturer voice, whose focus is Caribbean rather than Parnassian.
Sun (also included as the third section of a later version of Discovering Tropic) deconstructs tropical fantasy:
"We squint back at you/In the canefield slaving under your venomous fist" while Discovering Tropic reminiscent of Guillen's West Indies Ltd or Martin Carter's I Come From the Nigger Yard, juxtaposes the touristic paradise trope with Trinidadian and by extension, Caribbean reality: "the stench of stink drains." While acutely aware of the limitations of claustrophobic colonial small-island states ("Circling the Colonial prison-yard/Wherein we squeeze, jostle for position./Where is the end to this slavery,/Where an end to insularity..."), with the perspective gained from his London sojourn Selvon warns would-be fellow escapologists of the ignorance and prejudice that await them across the pond ("Are there many cannibals?").
A West Indian in the metropole, Selvon suggests, is subjected to another set of stereotypical limitations: "No reception for you abroad/Unless you play in steelbands/Chant calypsoes or plant cane."
The prose Poem in London broadcast on the BBC's Caribbean Voices programme in 1951, shortly after Selvon's relocation to London, introduces his lyrical voice, which blossomed in parts of Lonely Londoners and quintessentially in the short story My Girl and the City. In this extended meditation of "a Trinidadian...who existed 4,000 miles away" Selvon first arrives at the conclusion which allowed him to resolve the ongoing dichotomy between art and life: "There is a greatness in the written word, and when men die what they have said will live and sing for other hearts, but the greatest poetry happens in life itself."
Students and scholars of Caribbean literature and Selvon aficionados alike will be grateful to Cane Arrow Press and Salick for this attractively presented anthology which adds a new dimension to our understanding and appreciation of one of the region's best loved pioneers.