McNeill, Anthony
McNEILL, Anthony
Nationality: Jamaican. Born: St. Andrew, 17 December 1941. Education: Excelsior College, 1952; St. George's College, 1953–59; Nassau Community College, 1964–65; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 1970–71, M.A. 1971; University of Massachusetts, Amherst, M.A. 1976. Family: Married Olive Samuel in 1970 (divorced); one child. Career: Civil service clerk, Port Maria and Kingston, 1960–64; trainee journalist and columnist, The Gleaner Company, Kingston, 1965–66; producer and scriptwriter, JIS-Radio, St. Andrew, 1966–68; trainee manager, Jamaica Playboy Club-Hotel, 1968–69; assistant to editor, Jamaica Journal, Kingston, 1970; teaching fellow, John Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, 1970–71; teaching assistant, University of Massachusetts, 1971–75; tutor, CAC, University of the West Indies, Mona, Kingston, 1975–76, 1994–95; assistant director of Publications, Institute of Jamaica, Kingston, 1975–81; columnist, The Gleaner, 1981–82; lecturer, Excelsior Community College, Kingston, 1982–83; fellowship to International Writing Program, University of Iowa, 1985; teacher, Danny Williams School for the Deaf, Kingston, 1989; English teacher, Immaculate Conception High School, Kingston, 1990; English teacher, Holy Childhood High School, 1991; English teacher, St. Hugh's High School, 1992–93; freelance proofreader/copy editor, University of the West Indies, Mona, Kingston, 1994. Awards: Jamaica Festival prize, 1966, 1971, 1990; Silver Musgrave Medal, 1972. Address: c/o L. Wint, Camperdown, Linstead P.O., Jamaica, West Indies.
Publications
Poetry
Hello Ungod. Baltimore, Peacewood Press, 1971.
Reel from "The Life-Movie." Mona, Jamaica, Savacou, 1975.
Credences at the Altar of Cloud. Kingston, Institute of Jamaica, 1979.
Chinese Lanterns from the Blue Child. Leeds, England, Peepal Tree Press, 1998.
Other
Editor, with Neville Dawes, The Caribbean Poem: An Anthology of 50 Caribbean Voices. Kingston, Institute of Jamaica, 1976.
*Critical Studies: By David Lyon, in Contraband (Portland, Maine), 1 May 1972; "An Extreme Vision" by Mervyn Morris, in Sunday Gleaner (Kingston), 28 January 1973; Wayne Brown, in Jamaica Journal (Kingston), March-June 1973; introduction to Reel From "The Life-Movie," 1975, and "Lighting Words," in Sunday Gleaner (Kingston), January 1980, both by Dennis Scott; "An Invitation to Read McNeill's Reel from "The Life-Movie" by Bob Stewart, in Jamaica Daily News (Kingston), 29 June 1975; "He Writes Poetry 'of the Mindscape'" by Dorothy Pennant, in Sunday Gleaner (Kingston), 1975; "Our Modern Poets and Playwrights" by George Panton, in Sunday Gleaner (Kingston), 21 October 1979; "Please No Labels for This Jamaican Poet" by Cuthbert Alexander, in Trinidad Express, 26 March 1979; "The Journey to the Light of Anthony McNeill's Credences at the Altar of Cloud" by Femanda Steele, in Caribbean Quarterly (St. Andrew, Jamaica), 30(1), March 1984; essay by Wilfred D. Samuels, in Fifty Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook edited by Daryl C. Dance, Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood, 1986.
Anthony McNeill comments:
- My poems are struck sorrow-lanterns.
- My poems are village-girl simple.
- The faster my writing comes into being the more it instructs me.
- It's the music that comes from the floor of the sea that I'm after.
- I'm a failed writer for money's success.
- I kneel at one font, Poem-and-Earth.
- I stop at one church, Poem-and-Earth.
Anthony McNeill is the first and most accomplished poet to appear out of his generation of the anglophone Caribbean. McNeill is new in the sense that, coming to maturity in the late 1960s, he is past the rhetorical colonial assertions and dramatic nationalist self-doubts of the entre des guerres writing that gave us Carter, Roach, and the early Derek Walcott. His work is of the present in that it deals with clairol and speed and is very much concerned with splitting, suicide, and animal identity. But there is nothing gratuitously contemporary about these energies and work. Here is a poet of patient, scrupulous craftsmanship who is concerned with rhythm, cadence, form, and the fissionable rather than fashionable qualities of his words.
McNeill's definitive collection is Reel from "The Life-Movie." It contains thirty poems, eighteen of which appear in his earlier twenty-poem Hello Ungod. The two together give a fair idea of McNeill's thematic interests and poetic development. He begins, in setting and style, as a lyrical nature poet, as in "Cliff-Walking": "and this cliff / where swallows confirm / the sooncome of rain, / of long evenings adrift / from your meaning again and again." But this is not traditional nature in which metaphors come to rest in contemplation of superordinate glories. Note the phrase "adrift / from your meaning" in the last line of the poem, which just before had said, "and my eyes ride / upward, oaring me back / to loneliness" (my italics). It is this modern urban problem and paradox, the concern of anglophone poetry from Auden through Lowell to Plath, that quickly comes to dominate his page.
In fact, the sense of interior loneliness so pervades McNeill's poetry that even physical love ("Mummy +," "Dermis") is vitiated by it, until the persona/victim loses his hold on the self and becomes other. This can be seen, for example, in the zoo poem "Rimbaud Jingle":
When you trip
on my skin of sickness, bruised blue,
I'll slip from my cage and into
the pure life of lions. I'm death-
sick of being two...
This leads to a frighteningly clear and "cool" contemplation of the antisolutions: suicide ("Who'll See He Dive?") or the use of hallucinogens ("The Lady Accepts the Needle Again"):
The lady slips
out to her loveliness
lost irrevocably lost The Lady cries out
for ships The Lady cries out for Paris...
The Lady gets sexy & rings
a towering eunuch into her hell
But what makes McNeill an important new voice is his comprehensive perception of this agony. The result of interior loneliness is not just personal freak but also social impasse ("Reel," "American Leader") and cultural, perhaps even cosmic, catastrophe ("Hello Ungod," "Black Space"). All of the post-Dostoyevsky archetypes gather in his poetry, suffering from the death of God. They include the mad clown, the schizophrenic, the ape, Aunt Angel, The Lady, Godot, Dracula, and the dread icons from McNeill's own formative experience of the Kingston ghetto—Brother Joe, Saint Ras, and Don Drummond, the sacred trombone man. All of them walk through a broken, shadowed wordscape "whose irradiant stop is light," whose "true country" is "both doubt and light."
It is from this double (paradoxical, sometimes schizoid) vision that McNeill's remarkable sensibility expresses itself. But his development contains its own perils. More and more the light of his poetry seems to radiate not from the sun, no matter how distant, but from an agnostic space lit only by the flicker of a (life) movie, so that the poet finds himself, as in "Flamingo," locked into the "ponderous ingot / that weights down the base of / his / box," until only a dark solar doubt (unseen ungod) is left: "At twenty-nine guru / I'm still unprepared; / one day I will shatter / / yank loose in the wind / as a man stuck together with pins. / When the god comes, I'll tell him the perfect flamingo he gifted is gone" (my italics). But surely for one so seriously embattled with his own talent, this can be only a temporary or apparent illumination.
—Edward Kamau Brathwaite