Velma Pollard

A Caribbean Modern Classics reissue of Velma Pollard's celebrated short stories. Set in Canada and Jamaica in the 1960s, "Karl" is the story of a young man's encounter with middle-class Jamaica. His story is contrasted with Kenneth's, who rejects all that the middle class has to offer. Other stories in this book reflect the lives of women from different social backgrounds.

There have been many great and enduring works of literature by Caribbean authors over the last century. The Caribbean Contemporary Classics collection celebrates these deep and vibrant stories, overflowing with life and acute observations about society.Over our way lies a world of flame trees and hot beaches rimmed with hills, of raucous laughter in the market and shouts in the street, of bare feet running down dusty lanes and across burnt savannahs, splashing beside the boats of fishermen or inching up the ringed bark of coconut trees. A long way, full of laughing, weeping, blessing, cursing, explaining, quarrelling, accusing and lamenting.We cannot see the beginnings or ends of our way, but we can tell some of the stories of what happens over our way: stories which we alone can tell, stories about our friendships, our lonelinesses, our games, our crimes, our sorrows and joys, our triumphs and dreams.Suitable for readers aged 11 and above.

Caribbean Literary Discourse is a study of the multicultural, multilingual, and Creolised languages that characterise Caribbean discourse, especially as reflected in the language choices that preoccupy creative writers.Caribbean Literary Discourse opens the challenging world of language choices and literary experiments characteristic of the multicultural and multilingual Caribbean. In these societies, the language of the master— English in Jamaica and Barbados—overlies the Creole languages of the majority. As literary critics and as creative writers, Barbara Lalla, Jean D’Costa, and Velma Pollard engage historical, linguistic, and literary perspectives to investigate the literature bred by this complex history. They trace the rise of local languages and literatures within the English speaking Caribbean, especially as reflected in the language choices of creative writers.The study engages two problems: first, the historical reality that standard metropolitan English established by British colonialists dominates official economic, cultural, and political affairs in these former colonies, contesting the development of vernacular, Creole, and pidgin dialects even among the region’s indigenous population; and second, the fact that literary discourse developed under such conditions has received scant attention.Caribbean Literary Discourse explores the language choices that preoccupy creative writers in whose work vernacular discourse displays its multiplicity of origins, its elusive boundaries, and its most vexing issues. The authors address the degree to which language choice highlights political loyalties and tensions; the politics of identity, self-representation, and nationalism; the implications of code-switching—the ability to alternate deliberately between different languages, accents, or dialects—for identity in postcolonial society; the rich rhetorical and literary effects enabled by code-switching and the difficulties of acknowledging or teaching those ranges in traditional education systems; the longstanding interplay between oral and scribal culture; and the predominance of intertextuality in postcolonial and diasporic literature.

Shaped by Velma Pollard's sense of her Jamaican homeland's difficult history and unparalleled natural beauties, this poetry collection reaches the heart of Caribbean tragedy, both political and personal, without sentimentality, stridency, or loss of hope. With a finger on the pulse of change during the past four decades, these poems celebrate what is enduring through a conversational and thought-provoking female voice. Recording the experience of travel and the moments at rest when there is space for contemplation, as the poet reflects upon the inequalities of race and gender, and writes with authenticity on the contemporary experiences of Caribbean life.

Ranging over the Jamaican and Caribbean past and the encroachments of a turbulent world, Velma Pollard's poems return always to the quiet touchstones of love and friendship. As the middle years hurry past, her poems explore what is important, what might survive.

In "Dread Talk" Velma Pollard describes the language of Rastafari, tracing its development as an expansion of Jamaican Creole while showing how it is distinct both from Creole and Standard English.

Crown Point is the first collection of poems by one of the Caribbean's foremost woman poets. Velma Pollard's poems range from affectionate and observant family portraits to the righteous anger of an Afro-Caribbean woman's truth telling. Crown Point closes with a moving series of poems that meditate on death, mourning and their meaning for the living. They speak both of the deaths of parents and grandparents and of 'deaths falling early' and hear always Anancy's susu susu whispering words, 'tiday fi mi / tumaro fi yu'. These are poems which have a quiet, consoling truthfulness, no answers, just the unvarnished reminder that this is the way of life and that the dead remain with us: '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...' These tender elegiac poems of loss and remembrance have an eloquent stillness at their heart. All share a common depth of reflection and concern with poetic craft."Reading... Velma Pollard is to encounter an acutely sensitive consciousness grappling, even in apparently lighter moments, with the complexity of experience." Evelyn O'Callaghan, Jamaica JournalVelma Pollard writes poetry, fiction and studies of language. She was born in Jamaica and works at the University of the West Indies where she is Dean of the Faculty of Education.