Collected Poems ─ With "These Collapsing Times": Remembering Q

Victor D. Questel established himself as one of the finest new Caribbean poets in the 1970s with three collections, all published in his native Trinidad: Score (1972) published jointly with his friend Anson Gonzalez, Near Mourning Ground (1979) and his posthumous Hard Stares (1982). Sadly, Victor Questel died too young at 33 in 1982 – and who knows how his writing would have further developed. What is evident is that his poetry developed rapidly in the ten years between first and last publications, and that he left many fine poems that continue to speak to the present. The poems in this collection move from the orality and bitter punning of Prelude (his section of Score) that deal with the fall-out from the Black Power revolution of 1970; to his sceptical investigations of faith, particularly the family resonances of Spiritual Baptist ritual in Near Mourning Ground, and the severe and stoical poems of Hard Stares that look at himself, domesticity and political corruption. Questel, as Gordon Rohlehr’s exceptional tribute and close reading of the poems shows, was an unsparing observer of his own and his region’s failings. His world is frequently a dark one, but the poems are intense with life and bracingly free from sentimentality or self-pity. His skepticism centered most rigorously on himself as a poet, and drove him to the continuing refinement of the language and forms of his verse.

Victor D. Questel was born in Gonzalez village in 1949. He attended Trinity College and the University of the West Indies at St Augustine. At UWI he was the first student in the Department of English to be awarded a Ph D for his thesis on the work of Derek Walcott. He earned a living as a teacher and reviewer. He died suddenly in April 1982. In addition to his three poetry collections, he published widely in journals and in anthologies such as Now, Caribbean Rhythms, Melanthika and The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse.