Before Claude McKay became a leading voice of the Harlem Renaissance, he was a young constable and farmer in Jamaica writing poems in the island’s own dialect, capturing its rhythms, humour and hardship with an ear no outsider could match.
Published in 1912, Songs of Jamaica established McKay’s reputation before he ever left the Caribbean, and its warmth and musicality still carry across more than a century. A joyful, rooted collection from a poet who would go on to write across continents.
