Brown, Wayne
BROWN, Wayne
Nationality: Trinidadian. Born: Trinidad, 18 July 1944. Education: University of the West Indies, B.A. (honors) 1968. Family: Married Megan Hopkyn-Rees in 1968. Career: Staff writer, Trinidad Guardian, 1964–65; teacher in Jamaica, 1969; art critic, Trinidad Guardian, 1970–71; teacher in Trinidad, 1970–71. Since 1971 writer. Awards: Jamaican Independence Festival Poetry prize, 1968; Commonwealth Poetry prize, 1972, for On the Coast.
Publications
Poetry
On the Coast. London, Deutsch, 1972.
Voyages. Port of Spain, Trinidad, Inprint Caribbean, 1989.
Other
The Child of the Sea: Stories and Remembrances. Port of Spain, Trinidad, Inprint Caribbean, 1989.
* * *While the Trinidadian poet Wayne Brown was still in his twenties, On the Coast, his first collection, appeared with the endorsement of a prestigious publisher and won the Commonwealth prize. The collection is indeed an impressive first book, sophisticated in technique and sensibility. Brown has an islander's discriminating eye for the sea and its weathers, both symbolic and real, and his work is shaped by a distinctively West Indian tradition. Several pieces are dedicated to the leading Jamaican poets of his generation—Anthony McNeill, Mervyn Morris, Dennis Scott—whom he had met during his undergraduate days there, but On the Coast as a whole is dedicated to Derek Walcott, and critics have delighted in demonstrating the debt to Walcott in Brown's themes, situations, authorial pose, and even particular phrases. Yet it should probably be said that in this book he writes like Walcott, not like an imitator of Walcott. Brown has the sound of Walcott's voice in his ear, as if Walcott were a local poetic dialect he has mastered. "Crab," for example, exploits Walcott's Technicolor verbs ("a lizard hurls its tongue"), his characteristic similes, and his choppy rhythms ("waves, excitable as spinsters").
These are uniformly adept and cagey poems, and their scope extends beyond the shadow of the master. Walcott's example freed Brown to write a poetry grounded on landscape and meditation at a time when the vision of West Indian poetry was overwhelmingly urban and political. Yet Brown is not unpolitical. In his own depictions of the social landscape of the postcolonial Caribbean, his anger is controlled but not suppressed; in particular the poems on the passing of empire and the discontents of independence fairly crackle with irony. Consider the end of "The Tourists":
Under that sun
all is languor, and those who come
will find nothing unusual, not
one gesture or motion overdone
But for one parrot fish which turns
grave somersaults on the stainless steel
spear that's just usurped its dim
purpose; which was to swim
as usual through blue air, in silence, like the sun.
The highly visible trajectory that Brown's first collection seemed to promise was not realized, however, and seventeen years passed before Voyages was published, by a small press in Trinidad. The first part of this second volume simply reprints On the Coast (dropping three poems and adding two), while the second part offers some two dozen new poems, roughly doubling the small corpus. (It is curious that several uncollected poems that had been published elsewhere are not included.)
As a group the new poems are more withdrawn and confessional, not as public or playful; there are no more of the natural history poems ("Mackerel," "Devilfish," "Vampire") that enliven On the Coast. Observed nature has been refined to rudimentary, almost archetypal, landscapes: sea, shore, and breaking wave; earth, moon, and stars. Within these vast spaces there is a sense of narrowed expectations. In such poems as "Rampanalgas," "Facing the Sea," and "Round Trip Back," Brown writes about home, but the emphasis is usually on departures from it and the sea's encroachments upon it. Brown now writes more about love and even about domesticity (so that his affinities with Scott and Morris become clearer), but there is a similar emphasis on estrangement and loss. Here is how "A Letter from Elizabeth" recalls a day at the beach:
you wading in, all gooseflesh, squeals and wails,
me, tight-lipped, following; then both of us
pausing, as if sensing, even then,
the far advance and rumble of these lines
I write in desolation for you now.
In Brown's poetry the future has always been a realm of uncanny arrivals and spectral interventions ("The Approach," "The Witness," "Rilke," "Ramon's Dream"). Later poems tend to be retrospective, often nearly remorseful. "Prose" is representative in the way it looks back to a time "when love like life seemed boundless (till time halved it)," a time "of promise not yet unfulfilled." If the backward glance is increasingly one of loss and regret, the poet now looks ahead with something like relish to the final flight from earth ("Voyages," "The Briefing").
Brown's smallish output might lead us to regard him as a minor poet whose reputation must rest on one or two widely reprinted signature pieces. While he has such poems ("Noah" and "Red Hills"), the remarkable fact that more than half of the poems in Voyages have been anthologized attests to the consistently high quality of Brown's work.
—Laurence A. Breiner