From almost the first day I arrived in Guyana in 1955 I got to know Martin Carter. I had read some of his already famous “revolutionary” poems and the power of their perfectly expressed scorn and anger made them immediately memorable. I began to meet him regularly and knew at once that he was exceptional, his presence filling much more than its share of space, and that his poetry would from then on be a strong influence.
There were times when we were in especially frequent contact – when he was Bookers’ Chief Information Officer between 1959 and 1967 and especially when, as joint editor with George Lamming, he was helping to prepare the New World publication to mark Guyana’s Independence in 1966 and I was assisting David de Caires in getting the publication financed and into print. When Martin was at Bookers he was not what you would call an ordinary run-of-the-mill administrator but while there he played a particularly strong part in the process of Guyanisation which helped transform the old, colonial, expatriate – staffed upper structure and made nationalization when it came later a relatively natural and non- disruptive development.
