These remarks were delivered at the launch of Mervyn Morris’s latest poetry collection, Last Reel (Ian Randle Publishers, 2024). The event took place at the National Library of Jamaica in Kingston on 21 April 2024. The poems from Last Reel are reprinted by permission of the author.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Good morning/afternoon.
(All protocols observed)
First let me thank the organizers for inviting me to this most important function.
I have been asked to take a brief look at Professor Mervyn Morris’s most recent collection of poems: Last Reel.
Professor Morris’s poetry is not new to anybody here. If you were not made to read one or two of his poems in school, your children and/or grandchildren brought them home as homework. So you know what to expect of a Morris poem. It is likely to be witty and definitely brief. So let me begin with the brevity. You will agree with me that all his writing life the professor has been straining toward the Haiku. Now he has reached it and openly acknowledges it with three examples in this collection.
I have chosen one that goes along with the geography of the times—“Drought,” in three lines:
snapshot of the hills
shedding like a mangey dog
naked in patches. (23)
Morris manages, with his photographic eye, to show us the painful plight of the hills in times of drought. He knows that we know hills and know as well the mangey dogs on the streets of our cities. The poet puts them together. We hardly would. But once he does we find the match perfect.
And now I am introducing another category of poetry. This is one with which we are familiar: the almost Haiku.
Here comes “Bad News,” five lines and catchy rhyme-and-rhythm bad-talking armchair philosophers living in Foreign (countries):
Good news from the rock doesn’t please
some Jamaicans who live overseas;
but tell ’em what’s wrong
and they pass it along
like a virulent social disease. (16)
In a totally different mood we move to five and a half lines and in that space a whole history. It is one of Morris’s love poems. He is great at these, you know. He labels this “Page One” but leaves us at a place where we can easily imagine another fifty pages:
She caught him at the Welcome Party
staring; and when the last dance
was announced she found him there
beside her, whispering.
And then
he held her hand. (7)
I want to point out a small technicality. Listen to the words there and then, usually together in a phrase but here separated by a line (you cannot see it, you will when you get the book) and so reenforcing the immediacy and the power of the contact, to end with, “he held her hand.”
Morris writes “held,” but we may add eventually “took’’ her hand: in marriage or in faithful concubinage, I don’t know.
You may want to read that with another Lover Boy poem—“Anniversary Poem.” This one is again short. It begins in a kind of Louise Bennett way (and Morris is the critic who taught us how to read Miss Lou). In my head I hear
Me darlin love, me lickle dove,
Me dumplin, me gizada . . .1
On the page I see
Helen, my sweet, my lifetime date
we’ve been together more than 58
good years. I love you beyond measure.
Let’s do togetherness forever. (42)
Love works in these poems. It does not always. And now I am going to let Morris show you how to curse without using one forty-shilling word. This is a long poem by his standards and quite outside the Nice Young Man image we have of him.
Moving Up
I
I saw you with your man last night,
poised as could be;
looking like a real
celebrity.
I still recall the Saturday
you said ‘Enough’
and, facing my confusion,
judged me “rough”—
not cruel, just inelegant, you said;
you had your pride;
you wanted something better . . .
Thanks for the ride.
II
I’m somewhat smoother now,
and long past grieving.
Thanks again for everything,
especially for leaving. (31)
I want to end by mentioning a little-known aspect of Professor Morris’s life—the faithful Anglican churchman—and I will read one of the hymns he has written. I choose a short one so I can end on the same note of brevity on which I started. It comes after the longer “Harvest Hymn” and fits in with a Sunday morning meeting.
At the Altar
The gifts we bring are tokens
of what we owe to you
the true Originator
of any good we do;
and we, your congregation,
are grateful servants who
give thanks for your creation
The harvest comes from you. (29)
I thank you for your patience.
Velma Pollard is a retired senior lecturer in language education at the University of the West Indies, Mona. Her major research interests have been Creole languages of the anglophone Caribbean, the language of Caribbean literature, and Caribbean women’s writing. Essays in these areas have appeared in local and international journals, and Pollard is the author of From Jamaican Creole to Standard English: A Handbook for Teachers (UWI Press, 1994/2003) and Dread Talk: The Language of Rastafari (UWI Press and McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1994/2000). She is also involved in creative writing and has published a novel, three collections of short fiction, and five books of poetry.
[1] Louise Bennett, “Love Letter,” in Selected Poems, ed. Mervyn Morris (1982; repr., Kingston: Sangster’s Book Stores, 1996), 67.