To mark the anniversary of Martin Carter’s passing on December 13, 1997, Gemma Robinson looks at Carter’s Poems of Succession, published 40 years ago this year.
Gemma Robinson works at the University of Stirling, Scotland and is the editor of University of Hunger: Collected Poems and Selected Prose of Martin Carter (Bloodaxe).
Information about The George Padmore Institute can be found at
http://www.georgepadmoreinstitute.org/
The Terror and the Time can be viewed here:
https://archive.org/details/XFR_2013-08-07_2A_02
https://archive.org/details/XFR_2013-08-07_2A_03
2017 is a year of Martin Carter anniversaries. It is 90 years since his birth in 1927, 40 years since the publication of Poems of Succession, and 20 years today since his passing. Through this passage of time, we can now look back at Carter’s poetic career and see a triptych of work in Poems of Resistance (1954), Poems of Succession (1977) and Poems of Affinity (1980). More than any of the collections, Poems of Succession has a history full of twists and turns, and this knotted journey to publication can tell us much about Carter’s poetic interests, and how they reverberate for us today.
