Sam Selvon: Gifts

The Winter 1960 issue of the Tamarack Review, devoted to West Indian writing, opened with Sam Selvon's poem 'Sun' followed soon after by his story 'Come Back to Grenada'. I bought a copy at Sangsters in Harbour Street, Kingston, Jamaica, early in 1961; I'd already borrowed Ways of Sunlight published in 1957, from the Trelawny Public Library in Falmouth, near the school where I was teaching. Lines of the poem 'Sun' charged me then as they do today: