Una Marson, of Santa Cruz, Saint Elizabeth parish, was the youngest of six children born to Rev. Solomon Isaac, a Baptist parson, and Ada Marson.
In 1928 she launched her own magazine in Kingston, Jamaica – The Cosmopolitan – which dealt with local, proto-feminist, and workers’ rights issues.
Her first book of poems she self-published in 1930: Tropic Reveries. It was followed by Heights and Depths in 1931, and a play, At What a Price, performed at the Ward Theatre in Kingston. In 1937 she published The Moth and The Star.
Marson spent time in London, England, from 1932-36, and again from 1938-45 (the duration of WWII); it was during the war years that her work with the BBC lead to the creation of the Caribbean Voices programme. In her later years she divided her time between Jamaica and Washington, D.C., and it is now known that she suffered from clinical depression. She died of a heart attack in 1965.
Author of Afro-blues that draw on both African-American and Jamaican speech, and of folk monologues, she also wrote devotional sonnets and love lyrics within a distinctly un-modernist tradition. Marson’s work as presented here is a complex subject, striving to answer the questions of how to write as a woman; as a black, modern, diasporic subject; for the oppressed.
In the 80-odd poems that comprise the volume are relatively evenly taken from Marson’s early collections, Tropic Reveries (1930) and Heights and Depths (1931), published in Jamaica prior to her first stint in the UK, as well as from The Moth and the Star (1937), printed after her first return from Europe, Towards the Stars (1945), published by the University of London Press, and unpublished later pieces. Hence the reader is allowed to sail through the various stages of development of Marson’s craft, creating a rather vivid image of the artist’s virtues.
Presenting some of the most noteworthy pieces from a remarkably influential West Indian poet, this anthology sheds light on the lesser-known literary accomplishments of Una Marson.
She travelled to London in 1932 and became the first black woman to be employed by the BBC during World War II. In 1942 she became producer of the programme Calling the West Indies, turning it into Caribbean Voices, which became an important forum for Caribbean literary work.
Timeline
| 1930: | In 1930, Marson published her first collection of poems, entitled Tropic Reveries, that dealt with love and nature with elements of feminism. |
| 1932: | When she first arrived in the UK in 1932, she stayed in Peckham, south-east London, at the home of Harold Moody, who the year before had founded civil-rights organisation The League of Coloured Peoples. |
| 1937: | In 1937, Marson wrote a poem called "Quashie comes to London", which is the perspective of England in a Caribbean narrative. |
