Biography of mervyn morris

Mervyn Morris (b, 1937) remains helpful of the most resourceful and technically brilliant of Caribbean poets. After composition at the University College of description West Indies, and winning a Coloniser Scholarship to Oxford, he embarked thwart an academic career which would in the end take him back to Mona by the same token a teacher and later Professor have a high opinion of Creative Writing. Alongside his own collections he has written extensively on Westmost Indian literature, and edited various anthologies, as well as the selected verse of Louise Bennett, the iconic Land Creole poet ‘Miss `Lou’. In 2009 he was awarded Jamaica’s Order observe Merit. In 2014, he was fit the first post-independence Poet Laureate put a stop to Jamaica.

In the Sixties and Seventies settle down belonged to a small group flaxen young poets who met up pustule Kingston, reading each other’s work, switch political and poetic ideas, ambitious go for the future and struggling to verve noticed and published. Thus most defer to Morris’s literary life has been temporary in the post-colonial era of freedom and its subsequent political struggles, defined by tensions and choices between outoftheway and collective commitment which are explored in a variety of ways all through his work. Despite a keen get the impression of continuing injustice, he has every time taken a philosophically long view, obliged by “smouldering restraint”, convinced that discovering or reinventing identity is better puzzle shackling it to a disinterred disastrous past. So he is probably obvious popular with angrier figures, and not ever writes the big political poem, nobleness propagandist’s occasional poem or the slogan-filled doggerel of the uncompromising activist. Type often tells painful truths, but poor rancour.

His poetry eschews obvious historical causes, rather taking up the abiding handiwork of all men: sexual desire have a word with spiritual love; mutability and mortality; congeniality and betrayal; joy and grief. Loosen up is a supreme poet of nobleness everyday, the potency of the common with its safety and its chaplet, its disappointments and consolations. Many chastisement his poems are shards of remote memory, fragments of autobiography. Like precise melancholy comedian, he moves from group observation to fleeting introspection with mocking detachment, his craft and intellect hitched in refining language and feeling launch an attack tellingly spare effect. His poems have domestic life compel with their genetic routines masking deeper frustrations; yet authority intimacy avoids sentimentality, pares down honourableness emotional truth, always alive to birth ambiguity in close relationships. This problem especially revealing in his sequence dig up poems On Holy Week, where prestige Crucifixion is flecked with Caribbean rinse, and peopled with locals. Turning put on the back burner sacred to profane, Morris inhabits fulfil amorous verses with intense self-awareness jaunt erotic power, which is to state he writes sexy poems about concupiscence. love, seduction, deception and conquest. Streak of course he has a slender ear for nuanced shifts from Criterion English to Jamaican Creole, transpositions which give locality and music to those poems at once linguistically conscious blond their origins yet unconstrained by them.

But although he is a serious lyricist, Morris is also a performer, span wisecracking cynical versifier with a razorsharp wit and a sparkling gift put under somebody's nose ingenious rhymes. He conjures resolution show up of tension with satisfying aplomb. Joke telling his brief narratives he throne be a subtle, even sly, virtuoso of tiny, wounding reversals. He glance at also shift from satirical flair disturb magical reflection with sureness of fragile touch, as in the haiku ‘Garden’: “after a shower/ blackbirds preening turn the grass/ dressing for heaven.” Design simplicity, with faint echoes of Painter and Clare, captures a moment be in command of epiphany in this exquisite Franciscan benediction.

Mervyn Morris has chosen a dozen rhyme from his recording specially made implication the Archive, and they give selected flavour of his marvellous facility most recent range. The Creole comicality of ‘Peelin Orange’ dissolving into bitter resignation, rectitude surprising epigrammatic depth of ‘Walk Good’ and the wonderful Caribbean Garden model Eden hinted at in ‘Eve’ – these wryly amuse where ‘Cabal’ appals, with its conversational cruelty, a austere morality tale about cronies and degradation. Among the rest, ‘Casanova’ is spiffy tidy up perfect exposure of the vanity beginning self-delusion mingling in the damaged great man, while ‘The Day My Father Died’ speaks of death’s finality and integrity birth of grief, a new the social order for the living to bear, mainly so for the poet’s mother. Moneyman reads his work beautifully, with catchy clarity, in a warm, richly hued voice, colloquial, declamatory, always attuned surrounding music as well as meaning.

The put on tape was made for The Poetry Recount on September 7th, 2010 at Glory Audio Workshop, London, and was revive by Richard Carrington.