Poetry
Collected Poems
Frank Collymore · 1959
Synopsis
The collection gathers the poems of Frank Collymore. Several speak of the sea: “Hymn to the Sea”, which opens with “Like all who live on small islands”, calls it a source of love, of sustenance and of reflection, which gives life and destroys it; in “Return” it becomes a mother who casts out her living and her dead. Others hail the figures and customs of Barbadian society, the nurse in “Amanda”, the planters in “Homage to Planters”, tea in “Sparrows at Tea”, or idleness, “that blessed state”.
Context
Published in Bridgetown in 1959 by the Advocate, the collection was presented in 1960 by the novelist Edgar Mittelholzer on the BBC programme Caribbean Voices. Philip Nanton sees Collymore as a poet of transition, between the pioneers and the generation of the 1940s, outside the popular tradition championed by Kamau Brathwaite, who found the gratitude towards the planters jarring in the light of slavery. Collymore called himself a minor poet.
Who it is for
For discovering the poet behind the moving spirit of the literary review Bim, attentive to the shores of Barbados as to the daily life of the island.
Prizes and reception
Stewart Brown holds his hymn to the sea to be his best poem, the one that brings all his qualities together.
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