Poetry was the mission at the beginning of Earl Lovelace’s writing life until the frustrations of poetry publishing in Trinidad and the possibility of developing a more sustainable literary career opened the way to fiction. In the poems one can see a movement away from Standard English to the beginnings of writing in “native language” and a lyric sensibility that finds its way into his later novels.
In the work of the young Earl Lovelace there is an approach to modernity, history, social inequality, politics and cultural suppression which is realised within the firmly held perception that independence has to be about far more than changing flags, that decolonisation involves a radical reordering of a Eurocentric colonial society and the embrace of the submerged culture of the Afro-Trinidadian folk. If the mature Lovelace now sees that some of the attitudes – for instance to Trinidad and Tobago’s trans-cultural realities – require greater complexity, the recovery of these poems out of the archive offer a privileged insight into the development of one of the Caribbean’s most significant writers – and the pleasures of their intrinsic musicality and vision.
Edited by Mario Laarmann, the poems are sourced from archived materials at the University of the West Indies. The collection is further enriched by a captivating appendix featuring images of the original, annotated manuscripts.
Earl Lovelace was born in the remote country village of Toco. He worked for a time as a forest ranger and as an agricultural assistant in the Department of Forestry. He studied in the USA at Howard University and on Johns Hopkins writing programme. Whilst being mainly based in Trinidad, he taught at a number of American universities in the 1970s. His first novel, While Gods Are Falling was published in 1965, followed by The Schoolmaster, The Dragon Can’t Dance, The Wine of Astonishment, and Salt, which won the Commonweath Writers Prize in 1997. He is one of the few major Caribbean writers who, except for brief periods, has never left the region. He currently lives in the remote village of Matura. He teaches at UWI, Trinidad.
