Those who have followed Anson Gonzalez's career will imagine they know his evolution from the engaged poet of the political turbulence of late 1960s, early 70's Trinidad revealed in Score, to the confessional poet who adopted the persona of a Caribbean Don Juan in The Love-song of Boysie B., to the contemplative poet of spiritual exploration in Moksha: Poems of Light and Sound and Merry-go-round and Other Poems. In this new Collected Poems, along with a number of important new poems, Anson Gonzalez carefully disrupts such expectations by an arrangement that mixes poems from across the decades.
What this rearrangement reveals are consistencies of concern and approach, whatever the period. There is a compunction to truth-telling, however uncomfortable; there is a constant state of tension between the desire for involvement in the world (with the adoption of a prophetic voice to excoriate all that is unsatisfactory in it), and an attentiveness to the unbidden inner voices that speak of separateness and alienation; there is also an alertness to moments of unlooked for joy (and anguish) most often found in family and fatherhood. Above all, the poems speak of the impossibility of writing poems that do justice to the promptings that inspire them. In the process, Anson Gonzalez reveals himself as an everyman, an intensely Trinidadian man and a writer dedicated to the demands of art with his finger on the pulse of both the state of the nation and the state of the inner man.
Anson Gonzalez is a Trinidadian poet, critic, publisher and encourager of countless writing careers.
Anson Gonzalez began his career as a poet in the 1960s. Since then his poems have been published in numerous journals, newsletters, newspapers, and anthologies. In the early '70s he began his life's work of promoting poetry and the literary culture of the Caribbean, and Trinidad and Tobago in particular. In 1973 he founded, edited, and published 'The New Voices', a bi-annual literary journal that has published poems, plays, short stories, and non-fiction by more than 300 Caribbean writers. In 1974 he established a publishing imprint called 'New Voices' that published a number of important books by Caribbean writers. The 'New Voices' Newsletter was founded in 1981 and served the Caribbean writing community for 12 years by providing information about writers, literary competitions, grants, and workshops. He has conducted creative writing classes throughout the Caribbean, organized numerous literary competitions and poetry readings, obtained and awarded prizes to writers, and provided scholarships to writers' workshops. He has been awarded the Writers' Union Writer of the Year Award (1988), and honoured for his services to the Caribbean literary community by the University of Miami.
