July 17, 2019 issue
Authors' & Writers' Corner
Poets, writers and many songs have sung the praises of summer. Henry James, the writer said, “ Summer afternoon – the two most beautiful words in the English language”. Tennyson the poet, wrote “The moans of doves in immemorial elms, and murmuring of innumerable bees”. Horace Walpole wrote, “The way to ensure summer in England is to have it framed and glazed in a comfortable room.” In one of my poems, Liming, I wrote, “Clear skies above, white sands below, and out there the deep blue sea, the time is here, long lazy days, when I lime and loaf at ease.” (Song of the West Indies, 1986.)
Many song writers have paid homage to summer with songs like, Summer in the City, Summer Breeze, Summer Nights, In the Summer Time, Sun is shining, Here comes the Sun, Summer of 42 and more. One of my favourites is the Drifters, Under the Boardwalk – “when the sun beats down, and burns the tar up on the roof, and your shoes get so hot you wish your tired feet were fire proof. Under the boardwalk, down by the sea yeah, on a blanket with my baby, is where I’ll be.”
There is no breeze sweeter than a summer breeze, a tropical breeze, lying in a hammock, under a tree. On beaches around the world, there is a rush to the beach. In Portimao, Portugal, which I recently visited, there is a flotilla of beach umbrellas, looking like the sails of the Spanish Armada ready to invade England.
Beach time is holiday time, family time, summer games and playtime. There is surfing and sky diving, sailing and fishing. It is time to strip down to bare essentials, literally speaking! I must confess I went “topless” myself. There is little difference between age and youth – all are out to have a good time. The sea birds are soaring, the flowers are blooming, it is summer in Portugal. I like to walk along the beach, on the shores of the Atlantic, memories of childhood in Georgetown, British Guiana, where I grew up.
Some of the waves sparkle like diamonds in the sun on the horizon. I am notorious for picking up shells. I wonder if one of those little creatures had come all the way from my hometown to greet me on the other side of the Atlantic. For me, it is a time to let my mind wander, lingering in mystical places, enchanted by the psyche of the soul and my surroundings. Only a summer sun and a summer day can do that for me.
The long summer days give way to cool nights, flickering flambeau lights, fireflies, the neon moon, a time to wine and dine. I order a flask of sangria wine for my wife and I and things become mellow. I start to nod off as my day is complete. The only thing to get me up and moving is the sound of music – a soft, romantic guitar and a slow rumba will do it for me.
Life is short, like summer, all too short. Back in southern Ontario I sit in our garden and watch the chipmunks and squirrels frolic and play, looks like a game of hide and seek. The eagles soar overhead. My kite is tugging, begging me to set it free to ride the summer wind. I remember my kite-flying days growing up in Guyana, times long gone but never forgotten. It is an understatement to say that I am in love with summer. Join with me in a prayer for summer and all the heavenly promises it brings. Long live summer! If the creeks don’t rise and the sun still shines I’ll be talking to you.
By Romeo Kaseram
Velma Pollard was born on March 26, 1937 in Woodside, a rural village in St Catherine Parish, Jamaica. Her father was a farmer, while her mother was a schoolteacher. Pollard’s sister, Erna Brodber, is also a well-known and eminent Caribbean writer. The young Pollard attended Excelsior High School in Kingston, Jamaica, and later the University College of the West Indies, where she studied languages, Wikipedia notes.
Later, Pollard acquired two Masters of Art Degrees, one in English at Columbia University in New York, with the second in Education Science, which was completed at McGill University in Montreal. Pollard’s teaching career includes tenures at secondary schools and universities in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, French Guiana, and the US; she taught at the University of the West Indies from 1975.
Interests in writing and the arts were among the formative influences for both Pollard and her sister Erna. In her conversation with Pollard, published in the CLA Journal in March 2004, Daryl Cumber Dance explores the early, artistic incipience, noting the family’s prolificity for the arts. In response, Pollard acknowledges growing up in “an environment which… was artistic”, noting her father was also “a member of a rural drama group”. Pollard adds her siblings, including a brother Everton, “used to get bit [drama] parts in these little productions”. Additionally, Pollard notes her parents were always reading.
Says Pollard: “…[When] Vic Reid’s New Day came out, it was being read, chapter by chapter, as it came out in the Gleaner. My parents would read to each other, and their excitement at what Vic was doing with the language! And they spoke of him as ‘Vic’, as if they knew him – and they certainly didn’t know him, but he was… a household word, like a friend, not a writer.” Pollard describes her mother receiving packages of books from the public library “twelve and a half miles away”. She says, “[The packages] would come through the mail on a Friday night, with books that she had sent to borrow and then she would send them back, and they would send another package.”
That an environment highlighting the arts in drama and reading was influential on the young and developing Pollard is evident through her starting to write at an early age, which Peepal Tree Press, Small Press Distribution, and others have noted. Pollard won her first award for an early poem, with her telling Dance, “I got a First Prize for a poem when I was seven… they put it up in the school… on the wall, in what we called the Annual Eisteddfod, a sort of open day.”
However, while writing at such a young age, her work did not arrive at a publisher until 1975, when according Peepal Tree, she was encouraged to do so by sister Erna, and Jean D’Costa, the Jamaican children’s novelist and linguist. These early influencers were notable for initiating publication interest in Pollard’s work, such as D’Costa, who sent a story to the Jamaica Journal; later, Pollard began submitting finished pieces to other regional journals.
Writing in 2001, Darlene Schulenburg tells us in Identity and Dislocation in Caribbean Women’s Literature: A Study of the Writings of Velma Pollard, that while Pollard’s first poems appeared in the 1970s, a first volume of short stories in 1989, and the first novel in 1994, her work did not attract any of the “scholarly treatment accorded to other writers”. In giving well-deserved recognition, Schulenburg sought to situate Pollard’s writings in the context of Caribbean women’s literature, and on identity, dislocations and Caribbean migration, noting her principal contribution to the region’s literature was to be found in an engagement within, among other things, the wider context of debates on identity and dislocation.
Among Pollard’s extensive bibliography are Considering Woman (1989), and Considering Woman II (2010); Leaving Traces (2008); The Best Philosophers I Know Can’t Read or Write (2001); Homestretch (1994); Karl and Other Stories (1992); Shame Trees Don’t Grow Here (1991); Crown Point and Other Poems (1988); and, And Caret Bay Again: New and Selected Poems (2013).
Speaking to the body of her work, Wikipedia tells us, “Pollard's upbringing in a rural community has had a strong influence on her writing. Her work often features nostalgia of the countryside, and a strong philosophical tone. The way which she recites her work reflects the firmness and richness of her writing. Her poetry often times reflects on modernity in contrast with the slower lifestyles of the past.”
Also, the Poetry Archive notes how Pollard’s texts “demonstrate the diversity of her work, spanning themes such as family, religion, ethnicity and nature”. It continues, “At its most characteristic, [Pollard’s] writing assumes a distinctly philosophical tone and shows a strong moral consciousness. The melodious and expressive way in which she delivers her poetry allows us to gain a greater understanding of these things: just as her imagination is simultaneously sensual and nervous, so is her reading rich and stringent.”
Additionally, according to the Poetry Archive, “…Pollard’s research interests include Creole languages of the Anglophone Caribbean, the language of Caribbean literature and Caribbean women’s writing. In these areas she has often found sources of inspiration for her poetry, and has also been especially strongly affected by her visits to the British Virgin Island, Virgin Gorda, and Caret Bay in St Thomas US Virgin Islands – for which she admits feeling an ‘obsession’. Forms of utterance, in fact, are as central a subject for her as nature – and taken together they form a body of work which reverences things in their place, while advertising their connection with the wider world. It is this paradox that makes her one of the most important Jamaican poets of her generation.”
Pollard won the 1992 Casa de las Americas Literary Prize for the novel Karl, and the Silver Musgrave Medal for Literature from the Institute of Jamaica in 2006. She is retired from UWI (Mona), where she was Senior Lecturer in Linguistics.
(Sources for this exploration: The Poetry Archive; JSTOR.org – CLA Journal Vol. 47, No. 3 (March 2004); Darlene Schulenburg, Identity and Dislocation in Caribbean Women’s Literature: A Study of the Writings of Velma Pollard; Peepal Tree Press; Small Press Distribution, and Wikipedia.)