These poems give voice to Britain's Caribbean emigre's, whose journeys held strange echoes of earlier sea voyages which had brought ancestors from Africa to the slave plantations. James Berry, who was born in Jamaica, was one of these emigrants, settling in Britain in 1948. His new book explores the different reasons his fellow travelers had for leaving the Caribbean when they rushed to get on the boat. The poems also look back on slavery and individual experiences of hardship and trying to make a living.
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Summary
These poems give voice to Britain's Caribbean emigre's, whose journeys held strange echoes of earlier sea voyages which had brought ancestors from Africa to the slave plantations. James Berry, who was born in Jamaica, was one of these emigrants, settling in Britain in 1948. His new book explores the different reasons his fellow travelers had for leaving the Caribbean when they rushed to get on the boat. The poems also look back on slavery and individual experiences of hardship and trying to make a living.
Description
'Windrush Songs' explores the different reasons James and his fellow travellers had for leaving the Caribbean. The poems look back on slavery and individual experiences of hardship and trying to make a living.
About the Author
James Berry (1924-2017) was born and brought up in a tiny seaside village in Jamaica. He learnt to read before he was four years old, mostly from the Bible, which he often read aloud to his mother's friends. When he was 17, he went to work in America, but hated the way black people were treated there, and returned to Jamaica after four years. In 1948, he made his way to Britain, and took a job working for British Telecom. One of the first black writers in Britain to achieve wider recognition, Berry rose to prominence in 1981 when he won the National Poetry Competition. His numerous books include two seminal anthologies of Caribbean poetry, Bluefoot Traveller (1976) and News for Babylon (Chatto, 1984). His retrospective, A Story I Am In: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), draws on five collections of poetry, including Fractured Circles (1979) and Lucy's Letters and Loving (1982) from New Beacon Books, Chain of Days (Oxford University Press, 1985), and Hot Earth Cold Earth (1995) and Windrush Songs (2007) from Bloodaxe. Windrush Songs was published to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. He also published several books of poetry and short stories for children (from Hamish Hamilton, Puffin and Walker Books), and won many literary prizes, including the Smarties Prize (1987), the Signal Poetry Award (1989) and a Cholmondeley Award (1991). He was awarded the OBE in 1990.
These poems give voice to Britain's Caribbean emigre's, whose journeys held strange echoes of earlier sea voyages which had brought ancestors from Africa to the slave plantations. James Berry, who was born in Jamaica, was one of these emigrants, settling in Britain in 1948. His new book explores the different reasons his fellow travelers had for leaving the Caribbean when they rushed to get on the boat. The poems also look back on slavery and individual experiences of hardship and trying to make a living.
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