A Season of Sometimes

“Is tattle I tattling / sooring I sooring / call an’ refrain / serious like bleeding cane.”
Whether ‘klasekal’ or ‘kweyol’, these poems deliver the subtlest of hits and the most serious of points behind the camouflage of play. The scenes range from Brixton to Guyana; the tone traverses the tender, the celebratory, the ironic and the outraged. If A Season of Sometimes is short on conventional English verse forms, it has its own strong sense of structure within which to capture the rhythmic and verbal inventiveness of the Caribbean voice without taming it. As he writes: “If ah shop pon corna / na gie a wee trus’, / wha mex say / dem a go tak / iambic pentameter”.
“… both intellectual and emotional considerations are splendidly served… his collection of poems resonates with wisdom and wit…”
Andrew Salkey, World Literature Today
Marc Matthews is Guyanese. He now lives in Britain. He is an actor, was half of Dem Two. His first collection of poems, Guyana My Altar, won the 1987 Guyana Prize.