by Jeremy Poynting
The outpourings of expressions of loss over Velma’s death share a common theme: that not only was Velma a fine poet, short story writer, teacher and academic (in her foundational study of Rastafarian language, Dread Talk – the Language of the Rastafari), she was a generous, kind and supportive person whom people were drawn to love. From the distance of Leeds, we can only echo that. I met Velma in person on just a few, memorable occasions, but she was an assiduous sender of warm greetings to all at 17 Kings Avenue, with expressions of support and splendid photographs of Jamaican flowers.
We had a long association with Velma. Her collection Crown Point was one of the earliest books we published (the sixth, I think), back in 1988. This was at the same time as we published Jan Lowe Shinebourne’s two novels, Time-piece and The Last English Plantation, and it reminds me that Velma and Jan had a friendship, begun in Guyana, that went back over fifty years, and I know how much Jan, like so many others, will be missing Velma at a deeply personal level. We might think of people having a ‘talent’ for friendship, but that underplays the selfless effort that maintaining a wide circle of friendships demands.
I remember being in Jamaica in 1993 to launch a set of Jamaican titles, including Velma’s Shame Trees Don’t Grow Here (1992), with Ian Randle as distributor, and being taken to task by Carolyn Cooper over Peepal Tree’s then slogan, which was “the best in new Caribbean writing”, with a reminder that Jamaicans had known for a long time how good a poet Velma was. We changed the website description of Crown Point to “a long overdue” first collection. For me this meeting was an opportunity to discover what a warm person Velma was and how good a reader of her own work. From that time, we have eagerly published Velma’s new poetry collections, Leaving Traces (2008) and And Caret Bay Again: New & Selected Poems (2013). We also published Velma’s Considering Woman I & II (2010), the first part published elsewhere some years before, the second part consisting of new stories in dialogue with the first. It’s a source of deep regret that Velma will not be around to see her Karl and Other Stories, which we are reissuing as a Caribbean Modern Classic in April this year, with an introduction by another of Velma’s and Peepal Tree’s oldest friends, Daryl Cumber Dance.
My second meeting with Velma was at the ACLALS conference in St Lucia in 2013 where we shared with others a panel on the work of Garth St Omer, where Velma talked eloquently about her friendship with Garth and her admiration for his work. It was clear that, for her, Garth’s personal steadfastness in upright ethical values was equally important as the literary quality of his razor-sharp analysis of the moral confusions of the characters he wrote about. Such an ethical quality was the driving force behind all Velma’s work.
My last meeting with Velma in person was at Calabash in 2023, when it comforts me to remember that there was the chance to sing her praises to a huge Jamaican audience, whose thunderous and spontaneous applause signalled again how warmly and affectionately she was regarded.
The photographs of Jamaican flowering bushes we received pointed to one consistent element in Velma’s work: her intense appreciation of the beauties of the Caribbean world as a space for healing, as in “Long Mountain” where she writes “Long Mountain hold me/ leaning this shudder/ quaked on your shoulder/ pine green above me/ pine smell all over me/ mist and the morning/ mend this cracked spirit…” Her poems point to a saving grace in nature as a counterweight to the pain she saw being inflicted on people by other people and by the systems they created. She looked for the best in people but was also a stern critic of the moral blindness that lay behind the inequalities of class, race and gender in Jamaican society and elsewhere. As she wrote in her second collection, Shame Trees Don’t Grow Here… with its subtitle ‘but poincianas bloom’, whilst she feared that shame trees were not planted in the consciousness of a minority of Jamaicans (because without it “there are no moral restrictions on your behaviour”) the poincianas that bloom are not just the literal flowers but the incidences of brave spirit, generosity and integrity she also saw around her.
Such themes are explored in more explicitly social contexts in her fiction. The stories in Considering Women I & II have complexities of vision embedded in both individual stories and in the collection’s structure. Many of the stories in “Bitter Tales” are explicitly set in the past but often within some present-day context. In “Mrs Uptown” for instance, a story of male abandonment becomes an account of a woman who eventually finds a good man and happiness. But this is being told by the now elderly woman to her neighbour at a conference called “Young Women in Crisis” – with the obvious implication that such distress is not safely confined in the past. And within the balancing sequence of “Better Tales”, whilst each arrives at some place of epiphany, safety and even contentment, they do so in a world where babies are abandoned in pit latrines and where poverty forces families to give away their children.
Velma Pollard wrote as one who was deeply immersed in the African heritage of the Caribbean and deeply aware of all the troubling consequences of Empire on each side of the Atlantic, but also of how Jamaicans of every ethnicity had created something valuable out of the fragments. In “BM Revisited” she lashes the “imperial master minds [who] insist on London as the centre…” but celebrates “our hodgepodge wholes/ a finer axis now on which to turn/ a place where to begin/ a better centre…”
One thread that runs through all Velma Pollard’s poetry is the vulnerability of human life to time and mortality. There are fine poems of commemoration in all her collections, such as “Our Mother” and “To Gran… and no farewell!” These are poems which have a quiet, consoling truthfulness, with no answers, just the unvarnished reminder that this is the way of life and that the dead remain with us, as in “Two for Neville”: “No one philosophy can answer all/ each man is an island/ each mind is a muffin tin/ and so we sit with our invisible pencils/ working out strategies to cope with brevity/ to cope with our adieux/ to love – too sweet to forget/ to life – too intense to leave...”
Let Velma have the last say, with one of my favourite poems of hers, “Su Su” from Crown Point.
Susu su su Susu su su
among the yellow poui
you hear
I hear
leaves in the Japanese garden
“tiday fi mi tumaro fi yu”
like Brer Anancy talking in his nose
Susu su su
And how I laughed that day
I heard them say
“im shouldn bury there
Im a go back fi dem have no fear”
denying all the rural wisdom I had known…
Then quick and fast
some hidden hit man
strikes us off our anxious lists
and you
and I
stand open-mouthed
as poui leaves whisper just before they fall
tiday fi mi
tumaro fi yu
Susu sus su
Susu su su
