By David H. Lyman
When I began reading Richard Dey’s collection of poems (there are more than 150 in his newly released book) I’d get a few lines into a poem, stop, put the book down, and stare off into space. Flooding into my mind, with just well-chosen words, he had painted a scene I know. Richard had created a photograph of a scene that carried me back to the islands I love.
… open the shutters of Hill House … the white, wooden shutters huge & heavy on black iron hinges, bolted shut, top & bottom …
I have seen those shutters on wrought-iron hinges, perhaps not those exact shutters, but ones like them, as I wander the alleys of an island village.
Dey knowns these islands well, having spent nearly 40 years, off and on, living here. He began recording his observations of West Indian life, afloat and ashore, in a notebook during the summer of 1971. He was then 25, crewing aboard Eleuthera II, an Alden ketch at anchor home-ported in Admiralty Bay, on Bequia. Over those more than 30 years his notes became poems, articles for magazines and newspapers, many published in Caribbean Compass.
While in Bequia, he met and spent time with a retired charter yacht skipper, Morris Nicholson. From their conversations came a book: Adventures in the Trade Wind, covering the early days of Caribbean yacht chartering after World War II. Two more books followed, including In the Way of Adventure, the story of John Caldwell and Palm Island.
“I have written poetry and prose pretty much simultaneously right from the start,” he wrote me recently. “And published both. I had even managed to do this while serving in the US Army in the middle-late Sixties at the Army’s magazine, then called Army Digest. At Harvard, I then took Robert Fitzgerald’s famous course, English T, which was for students who could write in both forms, and it solidified doing both as an aspiration.
Poetry, it seems, has just been something Dey does. It’s more personal work, which is then professionally crafted into something that’s ready to share. It’s the work of an artist.
Some of Dey’s poems in this book are ballads. They could be sung. All that’s needed is a guitar’s melody, a drum’s beat, and a stand-up bass. His longer poems include “A Daughter of the Trade Wind,” a virtual novella in blank verse.
In these pages we hear the West Indians chat among themselves in a lingo that is more sung than spoken. His observations give us a snapshot of island life: a schooner entering harbor, a young lad with a tireless bike rim skipping down the road, expats, a dead man, and a young man who lost his boat and everything on it. Each poem is complete unto itself, and each poem a brushstroke in painting of island life.
Some of his prose is beyond me, but that’s more me than him.
So I skip on to the next page. There I find another picture I can see or perhaps feel. Dey’s book sits right on my bedside table. Read a page or two, and you may find yourself drifting off to sleep, dreaming of those islands.
Collected Bequia Poems is available at US $25, plus shipping, directly from Richard at rdeyop@gmail.com. The Bequia Heritage Museum, on the northeast side of Friendship Bay, also has copies for sale.
Afterward
She heels in her cradle on the dresser top
tossed in a spray of dust, my Bequia schooner
for whom I have no name. She freights a crop
of long West Indian cigars. This afternoon
her white windless sails shadow the wall
walling out another New England winter
of northwest wind driving clouds heavy with fall
of snow, of my third December since I sailed her,
gusting and graceful, across the summer waters
of that place on no map — true harbors never are.
Details of living there I half remember
with words unspent, collected like coins in a jar.
The winds that drove your sails drive my mind.
“Dissatisfaction” names you, drydocked in time.
(This poem originally appeared in Poetry.)
