A Story I Am In is not just James Berry's life in poetry but a book of
all the lives he has witnessed or been part of - a story of life itself.
He came to Britain in 1948, in the first postwar wave of Jamaican
emigration, later becoming one of the first black writers in Britain to
achieve wider recognition. Poetry mattered to Berry from an early age,
exposed to two main languages: the standard English of Bible and
prayerbook heard every Sunday at church, with all its rhythms and
sounding patterns; and the tunes of everyday Jamaican language, with its
sayings and proverbs, its special dialect words with their African
connections, its expression of a roots culture. These experiences gave
him that strong and particular Caribbean awareness of language which has
nourished his poetry over many years. This major retrospective of his
work covers five collections published over four decades, plus a
selection from four books of poetry for children. Much of his poetry
celebrates the divided world of a lifelong outsider. Growing up in
Jamaica, Berry felt as much disturbed by his African background as by
the European slave-trade and its aftermath. His poetry shows how 'root
agonies' made him view Africa as a thoughtless and neglectful mother,
how his years in Britain - most of his adult life - left him worried by
past, present and future. Now in his mid-80s, he has sought in his later
work to give voice to all the people who came on the first ships from
the Caribbean, whose journeys held strange echoes of earlier sea voyages
from Africa to the slave plantations.
