Poetry
Man to Pan
John Agard · 1982
Synopsis
Forty poems, to be spoken to the sound of drums and steel pans, celebrate the history of the steelband and give voice to the urban proletariat from which it came. In the prologue, the poet, saucepan in hand, gives the ironic recipe for the dish on which black anger feeds: first rape a people, then leave to simmer for centuries. Pieces of varied form follow, some laid out on the page to figure rhythms, in which the memory of four centuries of slavery returns like a refrain.
Context
The collection appeared in Havana in 1982, from the Cuban institution that had just awarded it a prize, under a subtitle that destines it for the stage: a cycle to be spoken with drums and pans. It runs to seventy-eight pages in English, although its author had been living in England for five years. The critic Marcienne Rocard, in Caravelle, described it as built like a strident fugue, or like a jam session: poems in apparent disorder, punctuated with graphic effects, serving an overall design.
Who it is for
Poems in English, written for the stage, to be spoken rather than read silently; no known French translation.
Prizes and reception
It received in 1982 the Casa de las Américas poetry prize, which made its author known beyond the English-speaking Caribbean.
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