Clayton Didier

Echoes & Memories Clayton Didier

ECHOES & MEMORIES By Clayton Didier The poems in this book, the author trusts, will open for readers another delightful window on one of the world's most interesting areas and peoples, the magical Caribbean. There will emerge, hopefully, a more intimate insight into the poet's own mind and a feeling of association with his country of birth - the Commonwealth of Dominica, enchantingly known as the 'Nature Isle'. That insight will come via a distillation of the meaning of a revisit through the poet's own life - his trials and tribulatiions, but also treasures and triumphs. Beginning with a rural upbringing in the idylic rural setting of Delices (jardin de delices i.e. Eden) during and after World War 11 on a British Colony at the end of Empire; the tragic death of his mother when he was only four years old; the treasured influence of a father - Educator, Farmer, Politician - on his early upbringing;and his early colonial education. Then as a young man, his intrepid flight from an aimless colony to its metropolitan centre of empire, carried on the great wave of West Indian migration of the nineteen-forties, fifties and sixties to Britain, the reluctant 'Mother Country'. His struggles to educate himself and achieve a profession. During all this, the poet brings that journey to life with the sights and sounds, and the thoughts and feelings of those with whom he interacted. In an extended soliloquy, he bemoans the legacy of misrule by the colonial power following upon the heels of unthinkable sufferings of colonial peoples under the yoke of Slavery. On retirement, he finally gets the leisure in which to apply his imagination to uncover and disect those experiences of his life and times, that come flooding as kaleidoscopic memories, the echoes of which reverberate in the privacy of his imagination, and which he wishes to share with those who he hopes will feel, and hopefully be moved, by the vibrations of this work.