Mary Hanna, The Sunday Gleaner

Mervyn Morris' 'fresh offerings'

One of the Caribbean's most distinguished poets and critics, Mervyn Morris, has been awarded the Institute of Jamaica's Centenary Medal and a Silver Musgrave Medal for poetry. His new collection marries selections from his previous works with a fresh offering of about fifty poems for a welcome compilation of Morris' witty and urbane poems within one cover.

From The Pond (1973, revised 1997) we have, among other poems, the popular 'Narcissus' which revises the received classic story of the youth who fell in love with his own reflection. Morris' Narcissus proves to be a coward: on seeing himself inside 'the lucid stream', 'he shrank into a yellow-bellied flower.'

From Shadowboxing (1979), the carefully crafted and critically acclaimed 'For Consciousness' appears among the several offerings. The poem is an example Morris' judicious use of creole and an example of how he uses the aphoristic spin of local languages to make his acerbic point about maintaining one's own position despite the 'thought police', the new version of busha: 'plenty busha doan ride horse/an' some doan t'ink dem white.'

From Examination Centre (1992) we find the steadily increasing minimalist nature of Morris' craft ironically commenting on his own penchant for 'story-telling':

facts lie
behind the poems
which are true
fictions
('Data')

Morris continues to use creole and variations of it to maximum effect: in the following poem he softly makes it work to release the tension in this short but telling benediction:

Teck time
walk good

Yu buck yu foot
an memory ketch yu

like a springe
('Walk Good')

On Holy Week (1976, 1993) shows Morris at his dramatic best, reaching deep into the characters of those who walked with Jesus at the end of his life, and those who witnessed His passing. Here we have Mary Magdalene in a moving poem of hope in her own voice:

Me, crying; just outside the tomb.
This fellow asks me why I'm crying.
I ask him where the body is.
'Mary', the man says quietly.

I turn.

The voice is His.
('Mary Magdalene')

The gentle and gentlemanly handling of the poet's craft is part of this poet's persona. He exhibits wit, irony, and good sense, and yet always keeps an even balance despite the intense demands of his calling. Morris is no shaman: he is a well-versed craftsman who is deceptively simple in his final forms. In his new collection, poem after poem attests to his need to be a poet who is not boxed in or taken lightly:

Then shall the poet say:

Draw near, and touch
my suppurating wounds

This is my psyche
broken for you. Give thanks

You have not cared enough.
But you may clap.
('Oblation')

The closeness of the poet and the Christ, as in traditional modern poetry, is clear, yet so is the closeness of the poet with his Caribbean contemporaries, since 'But you may clap' reminds us of Dennis Scott's 'Clap a little' in his poem about the harshness of poet's task ('Bird of Passage' in Uncle Time). Speaking - whether in Standard English or in creole or in some language part way between - is a hard task for the Caribbean poet who came of age in the sixties, the time of Independence. He strives to give his audience what they wish for and yet is conscious of having to forge a new culture.

Morris was one of the foundational group that included Anthony McNeill, Dennis Scott, and Wayne Brown, who was hailed by critic Edward Baugh as new voices bringing new forms into being in the sixties and seventies. They were transitional poets between the received culture and the dub prophets, like Mikey Smith, Lyton Kwesi Johnson, and Mutabaruka.

Morris chose to bring spare, lean, acerbic verses to the table, and he grows ever more adept with each book published.

Here is the gentleman poet, hailing his muse and making clear his own position (literally) vis-a-vis her:

'Toasting a Muse'

One man who came to dinner
wouldn't eat,
just focussed on his hostess
instant eloquent devotion.
He'd stand and say, as if proposing
A toast, 'I speak this is your honour
ma'am you are so beautiful,'
then chant some passionate verse
and sit and drink some more
until the spirit moved in him
again, then stand and say
'You are so beautiful' et cetera
and do another item.
Funny fellow. Poet. Mad as hell.

I been there, sort of.
For in that ambience I too
was smitten, by what seemed
to me more unusual radiance,
beauty of spirit lighting up the place,
but I kept quiet about it, made
small talk,
stayed sober, and enjoyed the food.

This title poem of Morris' new collection focuses its meaning through the ironic, wry perception of its persona and grapples with the questions 'What is a poet? What is his role in society?' Morris is always generous and gentlemanly in every aspect of his art, whether writing poetry or criticism or making a keynote speech at the launching of a fellow poet's work. He is refined in a marked way that leads us to respect his being and his craft. Morris will keep the form of the event, stay sober, and enjoy the food, but in the quiet of his own time and place he will write his reflective poems to share experience with his readers who will be allowed to know how much pain goes into his skilful renderings.

Morris has been called 'one of the most resourceful West Indian poets'. He makes elegant use of the linguistic resources of his native Jamaica to explore the relationship between private consciousness and commitment to the wider world of society, history, politics and art. Quite correctly, it is noted that his poems 'frequently suggest the tension inherent in moments of choice' (see the above poem for, for example). He explores aging and death, married love and lust, the self and society, reality and the imagination. His poems are deceptively simple; they release layers of meaning on close examination.

Mervyn Morris was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1937 and attended the University College of the West Indies before going to St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar. From 1966 - 2002 he taught at the University of the West Indies, Mona, from which he retired as Professor of Creative Writing and West Indian Literature. He has taught abroad and throughout the Caribbean.

In addition to his books of poetry he has written Is English We Speaking and other essays (1999), and edited Louise Bennett's Selected Poems, Michael Smith's It A Come, and The Faber Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories. Making West Indian Literature (2005) is a collection of essays and interviews. An invitation to enjoy Morris' work is inherent in the following quote from his poem 'Tutorial':

You may not
be as different
as you think

Enjoy, examine
what you find.

Welcome
to the mystery
of mind.
END