Poems of Succession was the first “almost complete” (backcover) collected volume of poetry by the Guyanese poet and political activist, Martin Carter. It included unpublished poems and a selection of poems from earlier anthologies. The book’s blurb introduces the particularity of Carter’s poetic voice:

The poetry trails down to us from the early 50s to the present with fire, with hope, with disillusion, with anguish. In some senses, it is an American voice in the tradition of Whitman or Neruda; in others, it comes close to the European tradition of a Mayakovsky. The parallels must end there. For there is something more – a tradition of public poetry and an uncomfortable private anguish.” (Poems of Succession blurb).

John La Rose was a life-long reader of Carter’s poetry and often quoted lines, not least “I do not sleep to dream, but dream to change the world” (“Looking at your hands”) which provided the title for Horace Ové’s 2003 documentary about La Rose’s work.

Born in Georgetown in 1927, Martin Carter worked as a civil servant then as a radical political activist in the early 1950s. He was imprisoned in 1953 and during his detention wrote his ground-breaking collection, Poems of Resistance from British Guiana (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1954). He subsequently worked as a teacher and was appointed Minister of Information and Culture in the government of Forbes Burnham from 1968 to his resignation in 1970. In 1978, the year of his New Beacon publication, Carter returned to radical political activity. He died in 1997.

By Martin Carter

Published by New Beacon Books

ISBN 9780901241207