Lamplight Teller

Berkeley Semple's The Solo Flyer impressed us all with its erudite, robust inventiveness. It impressed us as the product of a self-assured poet whose work achieves what Russian critic Victor Shklovsky said all good art should: "to render the familiar in unfamiliar images". The tautness of an unexpected image surprises the reader at every turn. There is no complacency of thought and feeling here-the restlessness of the unsettled perhaps. It was thought that on one level, Semple writes with the same concerns of many of Guyana's poets in exile, re-examining increasingly distant impressions of the Guyana social landscape; yet on another, that he brings to these, the fresh eye of a poet whose distance has not left him drowning in the angst of displacement, but rather, in Semple's case drawing on a poetic sensibility a poetic sensibility that is dispassionate and engaged at the same time. His poetry was judged to be intellectually tough and challenging in the best possible way, though some were put off by a perceived lack of variation in voice and craft.

Guyana Prize for Literature Judges' Report
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