His sense of the Caribbean is diverse, embracing the multiformity of its traditions. He uses a pithy and provocative humour to demolish views which are partial or narrow. Here is a voice which is lively and musical, sometimes classical in form, but always energetically demotic in using a diversity of language registers.
In several poems, but most explicitly in ‘Excerpt from 'The Whole Caboodle', Kevyn Arthur opposes the cultural politics of skin for a humanism which does not think: ‘Cogito, ergo sum Aethiops’ and where his grievance against colonialism is that it ‘made me take too long to understand/ that identity is a rudimentary fiction: that England and Barbados are Nowhere/... and we each are the Makers of the song we all sing’ (‘England and Nowhere’).
'Arthur's observations open up new vistas in the re-exploration of human possibilities... exciting.' - Mario Relich, Lines Review.
'Uses... great rolling, roaring tirades of slang, anger, lust, irony to powerful effect.' - Iron Magazine.
Novelist and poet Kevyn Arthur was born in Barbados in 1942. He has worked as a journalist and as a philosophy lecturer, and currently lives in Virginia.
