Edward Baugh is best known as a literary critic whose distinguished academic career has been devoted to West Indian literature, especially the study of Anglophone Caribbean poetry, and in particular the work of the towering Nobel Laureate, Derek Walcott, a new monograph on whom he has recently published. He taught at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies for well over thirty years, and was Professor of English there from 1978 until his retirement in 2001. He has also held many visiting posts in America and the United Kingdom, among them appointments at the University of California, Los Angeles, Dalhousie University and the University of Hull. 

Baugh’s collection, It was the Singing, contains all the poems from his first, A Tale from the Rainforest, and the selection he has made for the Poetry Archive contains much of his best work, and many individually very lucid snapshots of time and place, drawing on memory and fantasy, with both emotional weight and calmer, rational thoughts. So his poems often offer a tantalisingly pleasing surface, only to shift and disclose some deeper world with subtler meanings. The past is an unsurprising prism to play with for a poet of Baugh’s generation, and he certainly enjoys indulging the curiosity we feel at examining remembered selves, in long-lost locations and once magical and, as it turns out from the poet’s point of view, unforgettable circumstances or moments. ‘The Warner-Woman’ captures one such memory with an oddly heart-stopping economy, creating a perfect balance between the power of language and silence, as a storm gives way to the waiting calm, and youth passes into age. ‘Pilot Boat’ carefully holds in its craft the very form of an intense moment between lovers looking across the bay as dusk falls, making permanent what for them had similar qualities of the eternal.