Windrush Songs

These poems gives voice to the people who came on the first ships from the Caribbean, whose journeys held strange echoes of earlier sea voyages which had brought ancestors from Africa to the slave plantations. James Berry – from Jamaica – was one of these emigrants, settling in Britain in 1948. This late collection by Berry explores the different reasons he and his fellow travellers had for leaving the Caribbean when they rushed to get on the boat. This publication was linked with events marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery.

The poems also look back on slavery and individual experiences of hardship and trying to make a living: ‘Mi one milkin cow just die! / Gone, gone – and leave me / Like hurricane disaster!’ Windrush Songs ranges from from lyrical pictures of Caribbean country life to poems in the voices of travellers with desires, fears, anxieties, hopes and ambitions. James Berry came to Britain on the next ship after the Windrush and shared many of the experiences that prompted this migration in search of change and a better life. Many of the poems from Windrush were included in James Berry’s A Story I Am In: New & Selected Poems, but renewed interest in Windrush Songs has prompted its reissue.