James Berry obituary | Books
James Berry, who has died aged 92, was one of the best loved and most taught poets in Britain, a great champion of Caribbean culture, an influential anthologist and a determined though unsentimental advocate of friendship between races. His poems ranged from the lyrical to the caustic, but almost all of them intimately caught the speech patterns of his native Jamaica.
Berry helped to enrich and diversify the capacities of the English language, making conversational modes of West Indian expression, which a previous generation would have considered exotic or barely literate, normal and easily understood. In doing so he gave literary respectability to forms of language increasingly heard in the streets and playgrounds of multicultural Britain.
Along with his fellow writers Kamau Brathwaite, Wilson Harris, Andrew Salkey, George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, Stuart Hall and John La Rose, and with the blessing of an earlier generation led by CLR James, he associated himself with the Caribbean Artists Movement, formed in London in 1966 and whose effects are still felt today, long after its formal expiration six years later. In 1971 he was its acting chairman.
Born in coastal Jamaica, James grew up in a family reliant on subsistence farming and the sea. There were few educational opportunities, but he was close to his parents, Robert Berry, a smallholder, and his wife, Maud, a seamstress. He had five siblings. Recently, although Alzheimer’s disease had affected him for more than 12 years, on a walk round a park lake he recalled how as a boy he had helped his father with fishing nets.
He saw no future in Jamaica, and before he was 18 he left the island for the US, working for four years as a contract labourer on farms and in factories. When a friend chose to travel to the UK on the Windrush in June 1948, Berry said to himself: “The next ship, I’ll be on it.†This was the Orbita, which docked in Liverpool the following September, carrying 108 migrant Jamaicans, each seeking work, but in Berry’s case also harbouring ambitions to be a writer.
With some training acquired in the US, Berry joined the Post Office and spent 20 years as a telecommunications operator. He moved to London and lived in Somerleyton Road, Brixton, where crowded living conditions and racist attitudes provoked him into writing his first published poems, which appeared sporadically in small magazines. His first collection was Fractured Circles (1979), published by John La Rose’s company, New Beacon Books. Later publishers of his work included Oxford University Press and his eventual home, Bloodaxe.
In 1981 Berry won the National Poetry prize. His winning poem, Fantasy of an African Boy, is one of the most anthologised Caribbean poems. Its theme is money and the unlikelihood of a poor child ever having any:
We can’t read money for books.
Yet without it we don’t
read, don’t write numbers,
don’t open gates in other countries,
as lots and lots never do.
The conversational tone struck by Berry in the poem was characteristic of much of his writing, as though he were engaging black and white people alike, West Indians and British, adults and children, in a continuing dialogue, easing the stresses of the emerging multiculturalism which many people at the time saw as a destructive furnace rather than a creative forge.
Lucy’s Letters and Loving (1982) imagined an immigrant in Britain writing back to her Caribbean island, hurt and amused in equal measure by her experiences far from home. Folk memory of slave abuses and colonial insensitivities runs through much of Berry’s work, but the dominant mood is not so much anger as a yearning for unity and togetherness, a calm after storm, “holding villages and cities togetherâ€, as he puts it in his poem Benediction.
Later collections, Chain of Days (1985), Hot Cold Earth (1995) and Windrush Songs (2007), richly explored this theme further, with “standard†English always in a creative equilibrium with Jamaican usages and intonation. In 2011 his Selected Poems appeared as A Story I Am In. This was the title of a tribute evening in 2013 when many poets came together to raise money for Berry’s care.
He greatly influenced reading choices in schools and colleges through his outstanding anthologies of black verse, especially Bluefoot Traveller (1976) and News for Babylon (1984). In 1978 he spent a year as a writer-in-residence at Vauxhall Manor girls’ school, Lambeth, south London, which also resulted in an anthology.
In 1987 Berry won the Smarties prize for A Thief in the Village and Other Stories, one of several books he wrote for young readers. Among his other prizes was the Signal poetry award and the Coretta Scott King book award, both in 1989. In 1990 he was appointed OBE. It was typical that Berry, who worked regularly and closely with both the British Council and the Arts Council, should accept the award graciously in the interest of making the social and racial mix of modern society work harmoniously, rather than polarise. He was made an honorary fellow of Birkbeck College, London, in 2001, and awarded an honorary doctorate by the Open University in 2002.
He was taking part in a British Council seminar in Poland in 1986 when the radiation cloud from the Chernobyl disaster passed overhead. He took the view that if he was now a dead man he would go out creatively, and he immediately embarked on a new poem.
For many years Berry lived in Brighton, a close friend of fellow poets John Agard and Grace Nichols, who lived nearby. His wife, Mary, who died in 2002, was treated for chronic arthritis for much of the marriage.
For the last six years of his life he lived in care. From 1984 his partner was Myra Barrs, a specialist in English language and literacy, who survives him. His daughter Joanna predeceased him.
• James Berry, poet and author, born 28 September 1924; died 20 June 2017
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