BENNETT (Alvin Gladstone).
Out of Darkness.
Spine of wrappers partially defective, lucking a few centimetres at head and foot. The text block itself is tight.
The following biographical information is from an excellent essay by F.I. Case in The Encyclopedia of Post Colonial Literatures in English: Alvin Gladstone Bennett (1918-2004), born in Jamaica, emigrated to Britain in 1954 where he worked as a social worker and wrote for Jamaica’s Daily Gleaner newspaper. He published two novels and wrote several short stories which were broadcast on the BBC in the sixties and seventies, all set in the Jamaican community in England. This book is cited as his only poetry publication, and that his poetry shares the quality of his fiction “in which the social hunger of the wretched is confronted with the literal interpretations of sacred texts and the emptiness of hope… . Out of Darkness (undated) displays a degree of irreverence similar to that of his novels, the poems are conservative and traditional in structure.” To a casual reader, though God is present throughout there is a strong element of scepticism about clerical life, with satire on Jamaican consumerism, regret at the loss of island paradises, and resentment at social immobility and the lot of the poor.
Not found in the British Library catalogue, not found in LibraryHub, not found in WorldCat, no digital surrogate found. The unusual imprint published some ten books in 1957, including poetry by Edgar Foxall and Patrick Bosustow (remembered by the internet as headmaster of the very English “Junior and Senior School” in Cyprus.)
