"When Dennis Scott, Tony McNeill, Wayne, and I, in unplanned meetings in the warden’s house, discussed each other’s draft poems, Wayne would be more emphatic than the rest of us. He could be very challenging, not just about details in a poem, but sometimes its aesthetic assumptions. Even when I didn’t agree with what he was saying, the force of his attention was an energising compliment. I didn’t know it at the time, but he may have been remembering what he saw and liked in Derek Walcott’s approach: “a certain high seriousness that doesn’t have time for tact and caring about the person’s feelings, but deals with what’s on the page; that’s unstintingly generous if you think they deserve it, and unstintingly critical if you think they don’t.”
For more on Wayne Brown, please follow this link to The Caribbean Review of Books:
http://caribbeanreviewofbooks.com/crb-archive/23-september-2010/holding-the-strain/
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