by Mayukh Ghosh

When we think of cricket poetry, the two mainstream names that usually spring to mind are John Arlott and Alan Ross.
Arlott was always erudite and way back in 1944 he wrote Of Period and Place which included three cricket poems.
Years later, just before his death, Arlott wrote another, celebrating the famous debut hundred of Harold Gimblett.
Ross, on the other hand, was a brilliant writer, be it prose or poetry.
There are other well known cricket writers who tried writing cricket poems.
The likes of G.D. Martineau and Simon Rae.
And poets who found cricket to be a worthy subject.
Sir John Betjeman and E.V. Lucas being two of the more celebrated names.

Cricket poetry always had a niche reader base. Rowland Bowen included one by John Masefield in his Cricket Quarterly. Hence proved.
In 2004, Irving Rosenwater brought out The cricket rhymes of HC Coghlan, comprising the usually satirical verses of an unknown Australian journalist.
Then, last but not the least, Albert Craig, the much-celebrated Surrey poet whose rhymes are now real collectibles and such has been the stature and influence of this man that Tony Laughton has written three books on him and his work.

All these people were Englishmen. They romanticised the game. Nothing wrong in that but once that becomes the sole purpose, the over exaggeration dilutes the supposed meaning/message. Glorifying the game played in England, be it at Lord’s or at some random village ground, has often been the purpose of these poems.
And this is where John Agard has been different.
He writes in simple language, is not fettered by the British sense of superiority, and, more importantly, manages to touch and address complex, tricky issues via his poetry.
It is refreshing and important.

John Agard’s fascination for the English language had much to do with tuning in to the cricket broadcasts as a child in Georgetown, Guyana, in the 1960s.
‘Picture Georgetown, a city of mostly wooden houses on stilts. The flat coastal capital of Guyana, giving way to a dense rainforest interior. A South American mainland country that just so happens to be part of the West Indies cricket team, even though its nearest island neighbour, Trinidad, is at least a three-quarter hour flight away. A case we could say of geography bowing to history, Guyana being an English-speaking former British colony, bordered by Spanish-speaking Venezuela, Portuguese-speaking Brazil and Dutch-speaking Suriname. It was Guyana that produced Clive Lloyd, the most successful West Indies captain; Lance Gibbs, the first spinner to pass 300 wickets in Test cricket, the likes of Rohan Kanhai, who, after hitting a six and falling on his backside, would immortalise a shot known as the falling sweep, but which the locals would call the cowlash.’

And there were the air-waves and Arlott.
‘The name, Arlott, takes me back to my boyhood, perhaps the first step in the direction of poetry. For a Georgetown boy back in the late 1950s and 1960s, an era long before television had reached those Atlantic shores, the only box to be glued to was the good old radio, our lifeline to Test match commentary (courtesy of the BBC). Especially with the West Indies playing away from home, people would be huddled round a radio like a shrine. In cakeshops, barbershops, rum shops, market stalls, even under the shade of a tree.
‘And out on the streets, perhaps choreographing a path between a taxi and a donkey cart, there was bound to be someone breezing by on a bicycle with that state-of-the-art talisman, the portable transistor stuck to one ear, and only too happy to update the world on the state of play, announcing with a glee a six or four, lamenting with a shake of head, ‘Kanhai just gone! Run out!’
‘Against such a background, my adolescent ears would be entranced by one voice in particular coming out of the radio. The unmissable voice of John Arlott. And the way teenagers of today might pretend to be rappers, I would pretend to be a cricket commentator, mimicking Arlott’s poetic model of expression.’

Arlott was not the only influence though.
‘Along with Arlott’s Hampshire brogue, there was of course the Bajan lilt of the commentator Tony Cozier, a white Barbadian of Scottish ancestry, an iconic voice, bringing a knowledge of local history and folklore to the acoustic landscape of West Indian cricket. Acoustic in the sense that cricket commentary appeal to what might be called the collective Caribbean ear for wordplay.’

By 1977, Agard had moved to England. By 1982 he had won the Casa de las Américas Prize with his collection of poems Man to Pan. Subsequently, he won the Paul Hamlyn Award for Poetry in 1997, the Guyana Prize for Literature in 1998 and again in 2000, the Cholmondeley Award in 2004, the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2012 and became the first poet to be awarded BookTrust’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021. Since 2002 his poems have been part of the GCSE curriculum.

The Georgetown beginning is connected to the present day through his journey in life, but definitely not in the standard, straight, wicket to wicket line.
Cricket commentary, which allowed him to feel the beauty of the tongue, did not fetter his voice with Standard English. The spirit of his words remained laced with the familiar Caribbean expression, freedom and folklore, the penned and the phrasal, sun and surf, cadence and Creole.
Through his long journey in the path of poetry, cricket and the love of English merge inside him to produce some incredible lines on the game.

It was Arunabha Sengupta in whose mind the idea of the book was born. It is he who has supplied the introduction and commentary for the poetry in the volume. However, he came across Agard the non-conforming linguist before he encountered the cricket poetry.
‘It was during a course on Literature and Society in Vrije University Amsterdam that John’s work was introduced to me by the professor Dr Anita Raghunath. The lines, their incredible mischief and the challenge to cultural imperialism, canonicity and linguistic and racial stereotyping held me spellbound.’
The lines that Sengupta first read were: Me not no Oxford don/me a simple immigrant / from Clapham Common/ I didn't graduate / I immigrate…
on to: I ent have no gun/ I ent have no knife/ but mugging de Queen's English/ is the story of my life … and by the end of the poem Agard had him rapt: So mek dem send one big word after me/ I ent serving no jail sentence / I slashing suffix in self-defence / I bashing future wit present tense / and if necessary / I making de Queen's English accessory/ to my offence

Soon, he had stumbled upon “Prospero Caliban Cricket”. In Sengupta’s words: ‘The metaphor-juxtaposed cricket field with Prospero, the orthodox English batsman, taking strike, and Caliban, the fast bowler from the newly-independent West Indies, running in from beyond de boundary. The ball arcing like an unpredictable whip, the batsman’s foot feeling chained to de ground. It was a reverse-sweep of history, the Empire writing back. It was exhilarating.’
Sengupta next discovered the splendid appreciation of the English-educated academic voice of David Dabydeen, the Guyanese writer of Indian ancestry– flash of the tongue of his Creole willow oiled with the canon’s orthodoxy. The non-conformity of Dabydeen’s work – the literary ‘cowlash’ – follows the manner and monicker of Kanhai’s falling-sweep, and thereby his backside grazes an archipelago.
‘I also encountered the Devil streaking through Lord’s, with nothing in the rule book saying androgynous demons were not allowed in the premises. Then there were the Butterfinger books written by Bob Cattel to which John had contributed cricket calypsos. By then I knew that these poems had to be compiled into one volume.’

To pursue this, he enlisted the help of collaborator and artist Maha. Not knowing where Agard lived, a hurried Google search saw them arrive unannounced at the door of the registered address of the Lewes Literary Society, Sussex. It turned out to be the home of Mark Hewitt, writer, theatre-maker and stage director.
There was some hesitation when the request to meet John Agard was made. Understandable hesitation as befits such an unannounced visit by total strangers. However, Sengupta added weight to his demand by plonking down his latest book, the 462-page Elephant in the Stadium, on the table.
‘I am a cricket writer and I have come all the way from Amsterdam to meet John Agard.’
The mention of cricket cracked the door open. ‘John is a cricket fan’, remarked Pam Hewitt, Mark’s wife. After a couple of hours, Sengupta and Maha had been joined by Agard at Rights of Man, a tavern on High Street, Lewes.

The idea of a compilation of his cricket poems appealed enormously to the 74-year-old Agard. ‘This is one of a kind and I will never get the opportunity to do this again,’ he said.
The initial idea had been to include previously published poems – “Prospero Caliban Cricket”, “The Devil at Lords”, “David Dabydeen at the Crease”, “Bards in White Flannels”, the Butter-Finger calypsos and so on. However, even as the permissions were being arranged from Bloodaxe Books, in the words of Agard: ‘The Cricket Muse refused to leave the field of consciousness.’
The poetsonian kept producing new cricket poems, and digging up forgotten and shelved old ones. Ideas kept gushing forth, converted into verse and magic.

‘One day we were having lunch at John’s place in Lewes,’ says Sengupta. ‘And when I say lunch, it was an experience in itself. That was the first time we met John’s wife Grace Nichols, herself a Queen’s Gold Medal winning poet. Grace started talking about Frank Worrell, and I mentioned how the three Ws had been born within a few kilometres of each other, within the span of a couple of years, and apparently delivered by the same mid-wife. Within a week, John had written and sent “The Bajan Midwife”.’

And then there was a personal gift for Sengupta as well. ‘When Elephant in the Stadium was shortlisted for two book awards and named the best cricket book of 2022 by The Times, London, John penned “What’s the Elephant doing in the Stadium”. It ended with the lines an exposed stump in the Raj’s fortification/ A ruptured continent erupting into India won. It would be an understatement to say I was touched. It was the greatest of honours.’
Agard kept producing cricket poetry at a rate that was difficult to match by the publishing process. ‘Adrian Runswick and the others at CricketMASH kept asking me for a date for freezing the content, but the poems kept coming. They also tested the rate at which I could churn out the commentary. Finally, Mark called from Lewes, with John sitting next to him, enquiring about a possible publication date to decide on a date for a launch event. I gave him a date, adding “provided John does not write any more poems”. Mark conveyed the message to John. And John’s response was to send me another one a couple of days after the call. It was a delightful race against time and material.’

In the meantime, others pitched in. As Agard says, ‘Arun provided the enthusiasm, literary strokes and sensitivity to the pitch of the page. And Maha lent her imaginative visuals.’
Illustrations have played a big role in many of Agard’s erstwhile books, and he has often collaborated with the genius of Satoshi Kitamura. It was this aspect which fascinated Maha.
‘I was introduced to John Agard’s work quite accidentally through my fascination for Satoshi Kitamura’s illustrations in Agard’s book The Young Inferno a few years ago. And when I read his “Oxford Don” more recently, I was sucked into this Agardian vortex that made me sign up for this book.’
Maha of course loved the ‘puckishly witty, imaginative, and an often biting, take on racial stereotyping and attitudes.’ She elaborates: ‘Adding to the mix is the literary canon, imperialism, post colonialism, mythology and folklore. What I probably love the most is his mixed-identity adeptness to intersperse “proper” English with Caribbean Creole, creating a calypsonian sensibility.’

She found working with Agard a total delight, watching his energy and flamboyance, and observing him unapologetically disrupt the establishment and it’s accepted norms at every turn. ‘My illustrations seek to pair with his poetry and bring a visual completion to his work. A sort of landing point to the subversiveness of his work.’
And of course, like Sengupta, Maha further delighted in making the acquaintance of Grace and further sketching her as one of the “Bards in White Flannels”.

*Bards in White Flannels - Illustration from the book*

With the calypsos, poetry, commentary and illustrations marching on the double, Sengupta turned to the only person he could think of to write the Afterword. It was David Woodhouse, the author of the brilliant Who Only Cricket Know.
‘I could not think of another person to do it,’ says Sengupta. ‘Not only has he written the best cricket book I have read in recent times – and that too on a West Indian theme – he is the only cricket writer in whose writing I have found references to the cricketing links of Caribbean literary figures like Sam Selvon, George Lamming and others. David thought it was a worthy project and readily agreed.’

The delivery of the Afterword, though, went through a rather long gestation period. Sengupta recalls: ‘David kept emailing that he was not satisfied with what he had written, and the expected date got pushed back. Sometimes I did wonder what was taking him so long. It became clear only once I got the final version. The attention to detail and the depth of research underline the standards David sets for himself. It explains why he is never quite satisfied with what he writes. The afterword is one of the most erudite surveys of literature and cricket that one can hope to read.’

Woodhouse writes: ‘It may be one of the enigmas of arrival that Guyanese-born performance poets, rather more than nativist politicians canting about ‘national heritage’, have supported the communal institutions which sometimes feel under threat in twenty-first-century Britain: the arts centre, the classroom, the cricket club, the library, the museum, the public house, the public-service broadcaster, the theatre. In all of these places, John Agard has served audiences his distinctive cook-up of calypsonian mischief and liturgical grace.’

To Agard this has much to do with the essence of calypso: ‘It is not surprising that calypso, known for its subversive wit, is the musical genre most associated with cricket. And out of this calypso-charged ethos, would come coinages such as chin music to describe a ferocious bouncer whizzing past the batsman’s head, and a five-nil defeat of England in 1984 could be cheekily transformed by the folk imagination from the familiar whitewash to the more edgy blackwash.’
Agard believes that this way of developing a local linguistic tradition surrounding cricket is not really unique to the Caribbean. ‘This wordplay is also at work in those other British colonies (such as India, Australia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, New Zealand) where cricket had been introduced as a gentlemanly pillar of the Empire. Among those nations weaned on cricket and the English language, it’s striking that there seems to be an almost genetic post-colonial delight in beating the ex-colonisers at their own game, a delight that also applies to the use of English language. The Empire writing back with a bit of reversing swing, so to speak.’

While agreeing with this, Sengupta predictably has a slightly different point of view:
‘Cricket, however, remains one of the final bastions when it comes to the Empire Writing Back. The expectation in the ivory towers is for the pens on the pitch to play up and play the game according to the ancient domineering dictates.’
According to Sengupta, even calypso has never been given its due because of the parochial and Anglo-centric manner in which cricket writing is documented.
‘Of course, everyone knows “Cricket Lovely Cricket” because the scene was Lord’s, 1950. But the first such celebratory cricket calypso was written in 1928, in which Lord Beginner had hailed Leary Constantine. Right through history, stretching across Caribbean independence, transition and the growing might of West Indian cricket saw Kitchener, Sparrow, Short Shirt, Maestro Alexander de Great, Superblue, de Fosto, Mighty Spoiler, Lord Realtor, David Rudder, MBA (Maestero Born Again) and others singing to calypso beats, celebrating the game while covering complex issues of society, history, politics, ethnicity and race. It is a fascinating genre and a very, very important one. However, even though calypsos reverberated across the Caribbean islands and English grounds, with equal flair if unequal facility from Barbados to Brixton, the traditional pages of cricket remained rather unruffled by this wind-rush. When in 1981 David Rayvern Allen published A Song for Cricket, the 200-plus-page compilation of cricket songs included just four pages of calypso while the rest remained uniformly Anglo-Australian.’

Sengupta also underlines that this is not merely the saga of calypsos. ‘Even in prose, the cricket references of George Lamming, Sam Selvon, Errol John and others … the RK Narayans and even the Rohinton Mistrys … most often remain shrouded by frigid mid-winter snowflakes while summer days in prose are celebrated in the traditional Macaulayan manner by sticking to English writers. This is very blatant cultural colonisation. It occurs everywhere in history.’

In cricket writing, this imbalance is more pronounced than in most other domains. And in that regard, this book does its bit in filling a much-ignored gap and redressing the balance.

It is available from all the cricmash website and all the usual outlets.

Prospero Caliban Cricket and other Glorious Uncertainties
John Agard with Introduction and Commentary by Arunabha Sengupta
CricketMASH
Paperback: £10.99
Hardback (Collectors’ Edition): £25.99 only from cricmash website