Antilles: the weblog of the CRB

Remembering Martin Carter

13 December was the tenth anniversary of the death of Martin Carter, a great Caribbean man of letters and a poet who stands--alongside Walcott, Brathwaite, and Bennett--at the head of the West Indian poetic tradition.

In yesterday's Stabroek News, Al Creighton took a brief look back at Carter's posthumous career and offered close readings of two of his poems, "The Poems Man" and "The Conjunction". The CRB has run two substantial pieces on Carter in the last couple of years. In our November 2006 issue, Vahni Capildeo reviewed University of Hunger, the edition of Carter's poems edited by Gemma Robinson. And in February 2006, we published an essay on Carter, "The truth of craft", by Stewart Brown (who co-edited another edition of the great man's poems last year, with Ian McDonald).

(I wrote a review of University of Hunger too--in the July/August 2006 Caribbean Beat.)

Other Carter resources online:
- his very brief Wikipedia entry (in need of some expert attention)
- his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, for those with subscriptions
- a short tribute by Geoffrey Philp, published on Carter's birthday in 2006
- a review of Carter's 1977 Poems of Succession, by Wyck Williams
- an interview with Carter done in 1995 by Gemma Robinson