New Beacon Book Club

Linton Kwesi Johnson:

John was a poet of ideas and emotion who wrote private and public, personal and political poetry. As some of the poems in Foundations show, there is often no clear demarcation between the personal and the political in John’s poetry. Some of the poems are tightly crafted; occasionally we find an example of the “unspeakable” not quite finding articulation. John’s diction sometimes seems idiosyncratic with the use of words like “unstatisticated”, “preterite” or “knout”. He writes mostly in English but at times he opts for his Trinidad dialect, and there is one poem in the collection, ‘Fantasy In Space’, which is written to be accompanied by “kaiso or other related folk music”. Some of the poems in Foundations are complex, some achieve great rhetorical flourish, some are quietly meditative. As a first collection, Foundations offers ample evidence of a poet of depth, passion and potential. That potential was realised with Islets of Truth Within Me, John’s second and last collection of poems.

Rob Waters, Doctoral student and GPI volunteer:

Linton Kwesi Johnson, facilitating the George Padmore Institute’s reading group on John La Rose’s poetry, introduced ‘Word Creatures’, the opening poem of La Rose’s Foundations, as a ‘manifesto’ to the short work. And certainly this is a poem that anticipates the themes that La Rose takes up throughout the collection:

                        These words

                        Come not trippingly,

                        But fall unspeakable,

                        From islets of truth

                                                Within me.

Foundations is a collection about finding the poetic language with which to express a Caribbean experience. But if this is a manifesto, it contains neither the didacticism nor the unswerving certainty that such a term usually evokes. La Rose’s words are

                        Shouting for diction

                                    truncated

                        In pained secretion.

The poetry that La Rose brings forth is clearly a painful birth, caught in the paradoxical space between ‘torrential anger’ and ‘slow transfusion’

                        Undernourished,

                        Searching its way

                        To surface and illusion

                        Impossible of definition.

But this is, rightly, a manifesto of the best sort: angry yet eloquent and, crucially, always alive to a politics of the future while never forgetting the past. Reading these poems collectively, 47 years after their first publication, it was their generative qualities that were most pronounced. These were poems always open to future uses, but resolute in the humanity and commitment that they demanded these be framed in. These were ‘utterings, / Unkempt children’ that would, and did

                        Loose their mooring

                        And chant their own paean to the morning.

Heiba Lamara, GPI volunteer:

In ‘Song To An Imperishable Sunlight’, John La Rose weaves together the names of Accabreh, Cudjoe- 'Men of 1723 and 1729' — George William, Toussaint, Bogle, M’zumbo Lazar, Alcazar, and Jacob Thomas in a defiant declaration of historical consciousness. The poem is La Rose’s panegyric, Linton Kwesi Johnson said on the night, to the men of the African diaspora, along with the ‘blackmen of the past, / forever nameless’,  who fought for and secured their future.