GUYANA’S most famous poet — and one of the most important to come out of the region — is Martin Carter. Oft described as revolutionary, his most famous work was fuelled by the political turmoil that gripped his native Guyana in the 1950s and 1960s. However, his work could take on a tender character and could probe deep into human nature. Recently, the life and work of this outstanding soil of the soil was again brought under the spotlight — at the 2012 Martin Carter Memorial Lecture hosted at the Umana Yana. This edition focused chiefly on Carter’s works: “The Terror and the Time” (1976), to “The Poetry Notebooks”. Attendees were guided through the work by Author and former University lecturer Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine.
Hailing from African, Indian and European ancestry, Martin Wylde Carter was born in Georgetown, British Guiana on June 7, 1927 to parents Victor and Violet Carter, who were avid readers and instilled in him a love of literature and letters.
After graduating from the prestigious Georgetown boys’ school, Queen’s College, in 1944, Carter worked first as a postal employee, then as secretary to the superintendent of prisons.
In the 1950s, Guyana was still a British colony; and, like many Guyanese at the time, Carter longed for self-governance. Despite his middle-class background, Carter related to the oppression and despair his hard-working countrymen dealt with daily. He joined the anti-colonialist People’s Progressive Party (PPP), and in 1950 his first poems were published in that party’s newspaper, “Thunder”, sometimes under the pseudonym M. Black.
In 1951 he published, “The Hill of Fire Glows Red”, his first collection of poetry. In 1952, Carter published two more volumes of work in Guyana, “The Kind Eagle” (Poems of Prison) and “The Hidden Man” (Other Poems of Prison). Again, the poems dealt with dreams of freedom.
In 1953, he married his childhood friend Phyllis. Later arrested as demonstrations against the British broke out all over the country, Carter’s time in prison was a turning point in his life. He composed his most important collection of poetry and attained international reputation as a poet.
In 1954, Carter’s “Poems of Resistance” was published by a socialist press in London, and received critical acclaim. The poems brimmed with the anxiety of the times — oppression, fear, bloodshed. In one of his most famous poems, “This Is the Dark Time My Love,” Carter wrote: “It is the season of oppression, dark metal, and tears. It is the festival of guns, the carnival of misery. Everywhere the faces of men are strained and anxious”.
Carter remained active in the independence movement after his release from prison, and in 1965, was a member of the colony’s delegation to the Guiana Constitutional Conference in London, the final hurdle before the formal achievement of nationhood. Thereafter, he served for two years (1966-1967) as a member of Guyana’s delegation to the United Nations.
He next became the nation’s Minister of Information. He saw racism, hypocrisy, and corruption flourish where he had once hoped for equality, truth, and freedom; and it affected the poems written in that period.  In 1970, he published a poem with the lines, “the mouth is muzzled by the food it eats to live.” To keep his role in the government, he would have to turn his back on the corruption he saw; but as chronicler of Guyanese life, he would not do it.
He resigned from his government post in 1971, and began to give literary readings and hold informal rap sessions with writers and intellectuals in Georgetown, thereby becoming “The Poems Man”.
In one of his poems, “The Poems Man”, Carter spoke about his chance encounter with a child in some far-off village, and the fact that she was able to recognise him even though she was so young.

“Look! Look!” she cried, “The Poems Man!”
running across the frail bridge
of her innocence. Into what house
will she go? Into what guilt will
that bridge lead? I
the man she called out at,
and she, hardly 12,
meet in the middle, she going
her way; I coming from mine.
The middle where we meet
is not the place to stop.

Though he could have chosen to, the only period Carter ever spent extensively outside of Guyana was in 1975, when he was appointed Poet in Residence at England’s University of Essex. When he returned to Guyana, he became writer in residence at the University of Guyana. He published “Poems of Succession” in 1977 and “Poems of Affinity” in 1980.
Carter died on December 13, 1997, and was buried at the Seven Ponds Place of Heroes in the Botanical Gardens at Durban Park, Georgetown, a site previously reserved for demised heads of state.