From left: Wayne Brown, whose literary workshops helped the late Gwyneth Barber-Wood develop her skills as a poet, Dayton Wood (Gwyneth's husband) and Ralph Thompson. They were among the many friends and colleagues who attended a commemorative evening in the poet's honour at the Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts, UWI, Mona, on Wednesday night. photos by Winston Sill/Freelance Photographer The following is an address given by Mr. Wayne Brown at a commemorative evening at the Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts, UWI, Mona on Wednesday, November 22, for Gwyneth Barber-Wood who died recently. Hailed as a brilliant poet, Gwyneth was a regular contributor to the Literary Arts Pages of The Jamaica Observer and later The Gleaner.

Many years ago, when Norman Manley died, there was the expected outpouring of eulogies in the press. But they went on for so long, and became so hyperbolic, that one day his widow Edna Manley couldn't take it any more. One morning she said to me angrily: "Now they're saying Norman was a saint. Norman was much too good in bed to be a saint!"

I understood her reaction. Death confers a mysterious majesty on those it claims, and the temptation to idealise the dead can be strong, and insidious. But to succumb to that kind of posthumous airbrushing is to let go in memory of the real, flesh-and-blood man or woman we loved; and I shall try to resist that temptation tonight. (And at this point, I hear Gwyneth saying: "I notice you said 'shall resist', not 'will resist'. When do you use 'shall', and when do you use 'will'? I always get confused with those two.")

I knew her for the better part of nine years: as a founding member of my Jamaica workshop, a contributor of poems to the literary supplements I edited, and as time passed, as a friend and scrabble partner, a reliable dispenser of buljol and a willing burner of CDs for my car. In those years she was unfailingly kind to me; and since in any city we orientate ourselves, however subconsciously, by reference to where this one or that one lives, she also gave me a subtler gift. Whenever Stony Hill came into my mind, it did so attended by a vaguely pleasant feeling. It was only after her death, when that name came up again and, for the first time, elicited in me not a glow of sunshine but a dark and awful wave of woe, that I understood that 'Stony Hill' had long meant her - and that now I was going to lose that Stony Hill.

In her last year, Gwyneth began sailing the boat with us, where she surprised me by being content to sit for the most part in a sort of blissful silence. I haven't sailed since her death, but I know she will be there next time I do, sitting to leeward in the stern and saying hardly anything. And that's going to be hard. Because the point is, of course, she won't be there.

But friendship isn't the reason we're here tonight. We're here because, whatever else she was - and she was many things, to many people - by the end of her life Gwyneth was, inescapably, a poet, and a poet of a high order: someone whose poems our children's children will be reading in school long after we're dead. So I am to talk about her poetry.

Two years ago I stood here, participating in a commemorative evening for Jullia Rypinski. Soon after Gwyneth turned up at my first Jamaican poetry workshop, up in Irish Town in March '98, she brought Jullia with her, and they both stayed with it for the remainder of their lives - one reason I tend to bracket them, loosely, in my mind. But there were other similarities between them. For reasons not evident to me, both Jullia and Gwyneth were quite insecure. (In fact, I doubt it's a coincidence that the years in which Gwyneth seriously became a poet were her years with Dayton. I speculate that he was the first man in her life to love her well enough, or to be confident enough, both in himself and in her, to give her, at some pre-verbal level, her freedom - and freedom, of course, confers on us the responsibility of becoming the person we're supposed to be.)

Now, as young women, Jullia and Gwyneth had each been very beautiful. And that mischievous pair of gifts from the sportive gods, that fatal combination of female beauty and female insecurity which men find so irresistible, led each of them to spend what are commonly called the best years of one's life in a virtual blizzard of men - and in Gwyneth's case, also of women - and the result was that each came to poetry desperately late. (Gwyneth, by the way, hadn't been in my workshop very long before she took to arriving and breezing right through to the kitchen, saying over her shoulder, "Wayne, OK if I make myself coffee?" I remember thinking - because I'd only just met her - "This is a woman who's used to men telling her yes.")

So poetry was the great autumnal love of both their lives. In time, they expressed to me, separately, regret over what they came to see - too harshly, perhaps - as 'the wasted years'; and this thought particularly haunted Gwyneth. One day about three years ago she startled me by asking, with real grief, whether I thought she had begun writing poetry too late to ever be a great poet. And in a poem entitled 'The Brine of Loss', written around that time, the same thought shines with anguish: "I have looked far enough into the dark of love;/ the songs I once sang ring with a hollow chime;/ the sorrow of a squandered life is such a grievous thing/ that I would sip the brine of loss: proof that I have lived."

I disliked that 'great poet' side of her, by the way, her longing for fame. She could never resist an invitation to read her poems in public, no matter how much I urged her to insist on being paid. Writers should enter literary competitions in the spirit of buying a lottery ticket - you send in your stuff and forget about it - but Gwyneth entered competitions as if her life depended on the outcome.

What redeemed her, what decisively separated her and her poetry from the wearying hue-and-cry of the prima donna pack, were two things. First, that the poems were coming from her, increasingly, from such a depth, and with such an urgency, that it would be true to say that she wrote as if her life depended on it. Even more to the point, her wish for recognition was inextricable from her determination to write ever better, bigger, truer poems. It never occurred to her to try to fake it, to hope for anything the poems themselves hadn't earned. When Milton called fame "That last infirmity of noble mind", he meant, I think, an ambition directed equally at the world and at the word; and that was what vivified Gwyneth. And the fruit of it in her case was so impressive, that, though I equivocated when answering her anguished question three years ago, if she had asked it this year I would have said, "No, I don't think it's too late for you to be a great poet"; and I would have meant it. The fact is that, after a variously exciting and languorous life, Gwyneth, in what turned out to be her last decade, set out with absolute determination to 'make her name' - not only in the shallow sense in which we use that phrase today, but in the profound and priestlike sense of self-creation: to become, through the poems, the woman she'd always had it in her to be.

And by the end, she was outgrowing the fame thing. Earlier this year she was able to write, to one of the Lesley faculty, a passage striking in its dignity: "What matters most is whether (art) does or does not speak its truth. If you give birth to a work of art and find it sufficient, move on to the next level. The true artist creates despite recognition; any glimmer it offers" - meaning recognition - "serves only to remind us we are not alone."

Those of you in the current poetry workshop will recall that, just over a month ago, we were reading the poem 'The Dream', by Roethke, the great American postwar poet, when Gwyneth suddenly burst out, "I love that poem!" That was eight days before she died. And these are the last lines of the Roethke poem:

"I played in flame and water like a boy

And swayed out beyond the white seafoam.

Like a wet log, I sang within a flame.

In that last while, eternity's confine,

I came to love, I came into my own."

Some time before the end of her life, Gwyneth through the poetry came into her own. So, however untimely her death was, she had that. And we have the fruit of it now.

Hers was like the textbook career of a serious and talented poet; and by that I mean that she worked passionately, intelligently and non-stop at her poetry. It could be quite irritating to have a Gwyneth poem, a submission to The Arts pages, drop into your inbox and, no sooner had you saved it and edited it than a revised version would arrive, with a note, "Wayne, I've reworked this; please dump the first version." So you save and edit the second version - and next morning, there in your inbox, is a third rewrite, this time with an apology - which didn't at all mean that there wouldn't be a fourth rewrite arriving in due course. A couple years ago, I told her I wasn't even going to open her poem-attachments until they'd been sitting in my inbox for a week; and I actually did that. But even that didn't always protect this editor from wasting his time editing a poem that would once again be revised by its author before he could publish it.

I recount this lightly, but in fact I lived to regret that defensive ruse. Five days before she died, Gwyneth suddenly sent me an email with six attachments, six poems. So many poems with one email was odd; I think now she sensed her life was in danger and wanted to get the poems out of her computer and into the world. But, as per my practice with her, I didn't open them - not until that shocking morning when the news of her passing came. And so I wasn't able to tell her how good I thought they were. Because among them were, in my view, the best poems she'd ever written. And I never got the chance to tell her that.

But to return to Jullia and Gwyneth - both such fine poets, yet quite different. Jullia was a child of money and Manhattan l'entre guerres, a cosmopolitan and sophisticate. Gwyneth, born and bred in the Jamaican heartland, was to the end of her life a child of nature. And though she was socially more than competent, as you'd expect a woman of her background to be, emotionally she was as open-hearted, as incapable of being ironic and making it stick, as generous and vulnerable, as nature itself. Jullia's poetry was characterised by wit, a kind of high amusement, and the authority of an original mind. By contrast, Gwyneth's ... love, really - for that's what it was: love of life, love of God's earth - took unto itself and gave back to us, her readers, the mountains and plains and plants and sea and ever-changing light of Jamaica, all of it strikingly transformed into metaphors for the human heart, in all its grief, nostalgia and tenderness. Jamaica, with its pale silent dawns, heraldic dusks, and loud or spooky nights, became increasingly the singing master of her soul; and by the end she had rendered this landscape, and humanised it, as no Jamaican poet to my knowledge had done before. The abiding experience of her poetry is one of love and sorrow; of love, and therefore of sorrow. For, as Yeats wrote: "Man is in love and loves what vanishes./ What else is there to say?"

What's more, in her last years Gwyneth was learning that you cannot love a country, not truly, while hardening your heart against its poor; and the plight, and the pain, of the poor became increasingly a theme of her poems, where it was expressed without ideology or cant. I cannot think of a better proof of the continuing growth of her moral character: someone who had spent so much of her life on Upper St. Andrew verandahs, and who had come to poetry so late.

Two years ago Gwyneth enrolled in Lesley University's MFA programme in Boston, and her exposure there to the talented and diverse American poets on the faculty, as well as to her peers among the students, whetted her interest in new and different poetic forms, and extended her range. In the last months of her life she was experimenting with the ghazal - the word means the cry of a gazelle - a 10th century Persian poetic form, and in English a difficult form. Her own experimental ghazal, titled 'Letter in a Bottle', contained such striking couplets as: "Who sees the Sun's clenched fist in the January air?/ Those whose gaze is west, whose skin is coarse as salt." And while I don't think she had quite mastered the form, her track record suggests that, given time, she would have. She was loving the experience of Lesley University when it was cut short.

In the years I knew her, Gwyneth's poetry grew so steadily in technical mastery and emotional depth that it was an elating thing to see. Jullia was her elder by more than thirty years, and she died at 93, so it shouldn't be surprising that her poetry peaked with her second book and had begun to decline before the end. But the graph of Gwyneth's poetry was still rising, and towards the end it rose steeply. I believe the news that she had cancer concentrated her mind and helped her shed the last of her mental babyfat. She was such a fine, fine poet in her last year: serious, masterful, fully adult: noble. It's not a word I would have thought to use when I first met her. But several of her poems in the last year were noble.

I confess I didn't think the Gwyneth who first appeared on my verandah in Irish Town in '98 was particularly promising. At the time she was writing those arty, constipated poems, after the early Braithwaite, that descend in a narrow trickle down the page, full of one-word and two-word lines. And her social manner was only slightly less the sort of complacent, pleased-with-herself flounce that had me forever inviting Jullia to leave her metaphorical pearls behind when coming to the workshop. The workshop sometimes attracts prima donnas, and I guess I assumed Gwyneth was one, and would soon leave.

But she didn't leave. She struggled at first to learn the poems the workshop poets have to learn and recite by heart each week; struggled and often failed; and her metrical exercises were clumsy and lagged behind those of other beginning writers. (I later learnt she often descended the Irish Town hill in tears.) But to my surprise she returned for the next workshop, and then the next; and at some point - which I can no longer remember - lo and behold, in the midst of her verses the miracle of poetry began happening.

It wasn't an easy process for her. Her dedication took the shape of mastering the different metres and forms; and for the first couple years her poems were, first, stilted, and then rhetorical, just as the sensibility behind them tended to be diffused by a kind of voluptuous sorrow. But gradually, inexorably, she mastered the craft; and the really strange thing to me was the way the education of her moral character seemed to follow in the wake of - and in fact to be pulled along by - her mastering of the craft of poetry. It wasn't that the woman grew and her craft improved. It was that her craft improved - and the woman grew.

I may never understand this, but I'm reminded of these autobiographical lines by Derek Walcott: "He followed, that was all,/ his life, one step behind,/ pacing the poem, going where it was going." Like that, Gwyneth followed the poems, letting them lead her into surer and surer personhood.

I mention Walcott for another reason, which is that, quite early on, Gwyneth took his manner as her model. And that was a measure not only of her ambition, but of the affinity of her sensibility to his. Because Walcott, too, at the end of the day, has given us the poetry not of mind but of the heart; and the characteristic light of his poems is not the moonlight of the soul but, as Gwyneth's is, the sunburnt light of Earth.

Earlier this year - again following Walcott, who in his 50s heaved himself up into Homer's longer line - she made a startling jump from pentameters to hexameters: that difficult line in which poetry flirts with prose without ever quite becoming it; and I confess that, not for the first time, I thought she was biting off more than she could chew. But six months later, I saw with surprise that she had mastered it. The poets here tonight who've tried their hand at hexameters know that's akin to a sprinter hitting a 100-metres in ten flat. It's not easy; not easy at all.

And that was the story of my own relationship to Gwyneth's poetry. Every time she hit a plateau, she would stay there just long enough for me to think that that was where she'd arrived - and then she'd improve again. Over the years, I went, somewhat jerkily, from thinking of her as a dilettante; then as 'promising'; then as 'not a bad poet'; then as 'a good poet'; and finally, as 'a class act'. And even then I hadn't seen the poems she sent me mere days before she died.

So how good was she, really, by the end?

I'll say this. Several of the poems she wrote this year struck me as unavoidable - which, if I'm correct, means they cannot be broken open, cannot die. Or, listen to the last lines of 'Conversation with the Wind', one of the poems she sent me the week before she died ...

"I sit each day and watch the ripe leaves drift and marvel at how simple dying seemed,

like the sky drizzling down cardboard walls

while suburbia sleeps, dry-eyed -

not like towns where faith and sloth lie side by side:

gutters and washed flagstones under one sun.

Small grief, where now porpoises leap and plough salt waves, eyes bright and black as ackee seeds,

with spirits soaring; I listen for you - on days, the sea like glass, I lean against the mast

and imagine the storm, the howl as trees succumb, rivers bursting with what the

villages sent down."

Listen to that last line again: "Rivers bursting with what the villages sent down". Those are, of course, the rivers both of her poetry and of Jamaica's artistic expression in general; and in the word 'villages' is concentrated the whole heartland of this island and its history.

I hope I have been unsentimental enough here tonight that you will entertain the thought when I aver that, if she'd offered that line to any of the great poets of our time - to Seamus Heaney or Josef Brodsky, say, or Derek Walcott himself - he would have taken it without hesitation.

" ... and imagine the storm, the howl as trees succumb,

rivers bursting with what the villages sent down."

That's how good she was, and how good she was becoming, when that merciful invigilator, Death, told her to stop writing; that it was time.