'...it comes
in the act of loving -
a cry of birds hoping South
a perfect sentence
sudden as candlelight's leap
at my wife's mouth -
comes at any moment
that will reassert the permanence of dreams
the possibility of dancing...'

(Dennis Scott: 'Strategies')

Perhaps the most insidious evil of fascism is that, in focusing -- and trying to focus others -- on the reality and nearness of the threat it represents, one scants the occasions for celebrating the very human spirit which fascism seeks to destroy. So, preoccupied with the Bush regime's unleashing of mass murder upon Iraq (in the name of, ultimately, nothing more than huge personal profits for the Bushies), I overlooked the anniversary last month of the death of Jamaica's finest ever poet-playwright, Dennis Scott.

SCOTT... tough-minded, ironical and clear-eyed social commentary

Most people over 25 would have seen Scott on TV: the shiny-headed 'red' actor playing Lester, the father-in-law on The Cosby Show. Far fewer would have known him as a poet of the highest order, the winner of the Commonwealth Prize for Poetry, who in the last years of his life was chairman of the Directing Department of Yale University's School of Drama.

For my part, I first met Dennis Scott here at Mona, in the mid-60s. Along with Tony McNeill and Mervyn Morris, we were a quartet of young writers who converged upon one another's poems as they came hot off the typewriter, like bees converging upon a succulence. Except that in memory the taste of those years is rather like lime, clarifying and acidic.

An acidic elation! For that impersonal ardour, that urgent appraisal of one's work by one's peers, there would, I later discovered, be no substitute. We gave to each other's poems an ardour of critical attention which I am sure they never enjoyed again; and the fact that as poets we could hardly have been more different -- Morris, ironical, McNeill, electric, Scott, intelligent, sinuous and sometimes, tell the truth, downright sinister -- and myself, the lone Trinidadian, morose and subterranean -- was something that turned out to our advantage, years down the road.

Dennis's poems had a dancer's suppleness and grace; and that grace was the more impressive for being driven by a formidable intelligence and ballasted by an unblinking awareness of the horror that subsisted just below the surface of things. Like Frost, Scott was one 'acquainted with the night'. His poems were full of spiders, cats, knives. And yet the mortal man in company was quite the opposite: perennially gentle, laid back, amused, kind. I don't think he ever wished harm to anyone in his life.

Those were the days! Or, as Scott put it in 'Elegies':

'When we were poets world burned

with a bright ash, everything we touched

was fool's gold, was wonder -

remember?'

And if you want to know just how good Scott the poet was, look how in those lines he ironically evokes Nero's 'fiddling' (while Rome burned); how he withholds the 'ful' from 'wonderful', yet gets it anyway, from the expectation of it conveyed by the syntax, combined with the strong echo of 'fools' three words earlier (so that what you hear, dimly, is 'wonder-fools', which is precisely the point) -- gets it, only to override it brusquely with the chime of 'wonder/remember', with, in that standoff between agnosticism and nostalgia, the sounding gong of 'gold'.

I remember him at Mona, 35 years ago, in the V-necked, light blue sweatshirt, denims and sneakers which were his habitual garb in those days, dropping his head and slapping his thighs while essaying a sedentary brief sprint-on-the-spot, emitting a hoot of laughter, saying (in response to something or the other): 'I love it!' He died in New York a dozen years ago, at 51.

Scott's first collection of poems, Uncle Time, appeared in 1973. It won the International Forum Prize and the Commonwealth Prize for Poetry. But Scott was also a dramatist, and soon after the publication of his second book of poems Dreadwalk (New Beacon Books, 1982) he left Jamaica to teach drama at Yale.

The two experiences, of drama and exile, underlie the beautifully achieved poems of his last book, Strategies (Sandberry Press, 1989). The first reinforces the element of performance which was always a mark of (and in the weak times, a threat to) Scott's poetry. And the second had the curious but felicitous consequence of turning the poet's gaze inward for solace upon the world of his domesticity: his wife and children, his portable Jamaica. (Look again at the lines at the top of this column, where Scott rhymes 'South' with 'my wife's mouth'.)

And they come together, the drama and the exile (with its note of that other, ultimate exile) in 'An Exercise of Faith':

'Run!' she says. 'Now!'

holding his arm

and off he goes, their four shoes fluttering

on the bare winter walk

he's running, look! She's holding him tall

and sure on the path's long white and

suddenly I see green fields

a trick of the eye only

for where in January would there be

two pairs of feet brushing pollen

into the winter morning...?'

Look at the splendid actualisation of the action in those first four lines; the syntactical gearshift that leaves 'white' hanging, not an adjective, after all, but, orphaned, acquiring the malevolence and historical reference of a noun (the white people's world awaiting the child, the white of winter, meaning death, and the implied relationship between them). Look at the flood of emotion released by 'green fields' (and not only via the account of Shakespeare's Falstaff on his deathbed -- as Scott was -- remembering: 'And a'babbled of green fields'); at the poignant pun on 'eye'; at the way the rhythm of the next line throws the emphasis of an oath on 'January', so that one hears an inkling of the demotic, 'for where in hell would there be', an inkling that links January/winter to 'hell'.

And if you think I am overrating this wonderful poet's craft and seeing too much in these lines, look how powerfully -- and how terrifyingly -- 'An Exercise of Faith' opens out at the end:

'Run! There's nothing ahead, just me, my voice,

just my life, my love, your faith

will be a muscle of air to hold us ever

safe, summer-quick

in the cold, in the dark, now!'

Scott's earlier poetry was often distinguished by social commentary that was tough-minded, ironical and clear-eyed. But the characteristic note of his last book is, rather, intimate. In a glancing rejection of 'history' and what that word meant in the American South, he declared 'the confederacy that I wish: those /who in some way keep the light/ from going out'. And the title poem of Strategies concludes:

'...since there is no armour

but the festivals we make

hand over hand

(the heart's drum louder

than any sound of soldier's falling)

till the war is over

let us celebrate

ourselves, all that is kind

and carnival, living

without goodbyes

without the acquiescences of grief

of ending

That small victory, only.

To this columnist, a writer and a West Indian of Scott's generation, now negotiating the tricky channel between the scarred cliffs of middle age -- while staring in horror at the spectre of an America turned, at a stroke, from being the hope of the world into being the world's mass murderer -- Scott's poetry, in its mastery and humanity, is both elating and consoling. It is high time that those responsible for Jamaican culture collected and reissued his parceled out poems in a single volume.

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