______ FEATURED POET |
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| COPYRIGHT © 2006-2020 rosalienebacchus.com. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS PAGE WAS LAST UPDATED ON: 28 JANUARY 2020 |
| LISTEN TO |
| Cane Man in cane field slashing stalk & smashing bones. Bleeding cane sugar. HAIKU POEM ROSALIENE BACCHUS |
For Sinab Kloss
2—cane
our cane
man came
nameless, out of nowhere
a coolie cursed, it seemed,
to wander the worst
parts of this city
year in
year out
his shout (Cane
Man
here!) brazen herald
of the sweet
season of himself
we marvelled then at
how brown he was
(how browner than us)
almost black, like molasses
how so slow, yet strong
his bow-legged gait
carrying him around
our housing scheme
all that dreary afternoon
that spanned '85 to '89
in the hot, shimmering
sunshine of our summer
the blackened, grooved cutlass
drifting upward to the sky, and
hovering for the space of some
fleeting, uncaught memory
all theatrical, ritual motion
for a flick of wrist was enough to
slice a 50c stalk into 25c halves
we built epic fantasies around
the precarious silver, glinting
sun-sparked edge of that blade
we'd ask to hold it, and were
suddenly on some raid of some
lost ark or we'd become
the swashbuckling Technicolor
Prince of Baghdad, premiering four
decades late, every day at five
on the decade's singular channel
one day a bold friend of mine
grew bolder still and asked his name
to hear him say, matter-of-fact,
me dun fugget am, lang time back
we simply thereafter
called him "Sugar"
Poem from Coming Up Hot: Eight New Poets from
the Caribbean, Preface by Kwame Dawes, Peekash
Press, US Office, c/o Akashic Books, New York, 2015
Excerpt from SUGAR "the god assembled, cane by cane" —Walcott Ruel Johnson |
| CANE SUGAR |
RUEL JOHNSON is a
poet and short story
Georgetown, Guyana.
After discovering the
work of Derek Walcott
and Pablo Neruda,
around 17 to 18 years
of age, he starting
writing poetry.
His work is largely
concerned with the
issues facing
contemporary Guyana,
including its political
and ethnic divisions.
His literary awards
include:
~ 2002 Guyana Prize
for his short story
collection Ariadne and
other Stories and
~ 2012 Guyana Prize
for Fictions.
His Collected Poems
2002-2012 was
published by Janus
Books in 2013.
Fictions, Volume 2 is in
the works.
poet and short story
Georgetown, Guyana.
After discovering the
work of Derek Walcott
and Pablo Neruda,
around 17 to 18 years
of age, he starting
writing poetry.
His work is largely
concerned with the
issues facing
contemporary Guyana,
including its political
and ethnic divisions.
His literary awards
include:
~ 2002 Guyana Prize
for his short story
collection Ariadne and
other Stories and
~ 2012 Guyana Prize
for Fictions.
His Collected Poems
2002-2012 was
published by Janus
Books in 2013.
Fictions, Volume 2 is in
the works.
With Johnson, the achievement is in his line. There is a
command of syntax and metaphor that is admirable in its
seeming effortlessness and clear efficiency. We see his craft
most clearly in the sophisticated architecture of his
multisectional long poems, where his use of unifying echoes
in sentiment and language, as well as his allusions to the
work of other writers, Caribbean and outside, are never
pretentious or gratuitous, but necessary features of poems
that offer a lyric wrestling with faith and memory, as well as
a communal wrestling with a society's sense of identity and
history.
~ EXCERPT FROM PREFACE BY KWAME DAWES, COMING UP HOT: EIGHT NEW
POETS FROM THE CARIBBEAN, PEEKASH PRESS, NEW YORK & LONDON, 2015.
[Johnson's] poems are scrupulously crafted, inventive,
intelligent. They owe a happy debt to the work of Derek
Walcott, whose poem "Hic Jacet" Johnson has adopted as a
sort of credo. Like the younger Walcott, Johnson's
self-appointed task is the transformation of the facts of his
everyday world -"as painfully prosaic as a laundry list" -into
fresh metaphors for the experience of his time and place, and
ultimately into a new sensibility unafraid of life's truly big
questions.
~ NICHOLAS LAUGHLIN, "RUEL JOHNSON: HIS WAY IN THE WORLD,"
eCAROH CARIBBEAN EMPORIUM, 2012.
| KING PERAI BY KING PERAI 2015 CALYPSO MONARCH - GUYANA |
| WATCH & LISTEN |
| RUEL JOHNSON INTERVIEW WITH SELWYN COLLINS AS IT IS JOURNEYS & PERSPECTIVES FEBRUARY 2015 (DURATION: 27 MINUTES) |
