He often wears a little porkpie hat. With his glasses and his Van Dyke beard, he looks like the jazz pianist Thelonius Monk as a young man. Like Monk, he's deep in his own thoughts much of the time.

His name is Linton Kwesi Johnson and he's an Englishman ? in fact he's just been named one of the 100 greatest black Britons ? topping the list in the arts and culture category. Britain acknowledges him as its first "dub" poet (a term he himself coined). Last year, he became one of only two living poets to be published in the Penguin Modern Classics series.

And for his part, he acknowledges that Louise Bennett, Miss Lou, the patois poet about whom I wrote last week, has had a major influence on what he does and how he does it.

Modern black British cultural history dates from the arrival of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks on June 21, 1948, carrying nearly 500 Jamaicans. Many of them were servicemen who were returning to Britain from leave, but many were immigrants, come to help Britain recover from World War II. They were the start of a tidal wave of migration to Britain from the Caribbean, and if anything, the immigrants' transition to residence in Britain was harder to cope with for the British than it was for them.

Miss Lou, then starting her life as a poet, saw migration in that direction as a kind of step up the ladder of success for Jamaica:

Wat a joyful news, Miss Mattie,

I feel like me heart gwine burs

Jamaica people colonizin

Englan in reverse.

By de hundred, by de t'ousan

From country and from town,

By de ship-load, by de plane-load

Jamaica is Englan boun.

Linton Kwesi Johnson was one of the Jamaicans Miss Lou had in mind, arriving in England to live with his mother in 1963, after the British had begun to stem the flow of immigrants. By the time he got there, a black literary scene had already been established. The way of life those writers came from, and the way of life they went to, were as different as chalk and cheese. There was a lot of racism and hostility to contend with in Britain.

One of those on the Windrush was a Jamaican named Arthur "Ali" Curling, who, as it happens, had also spent some time in Bermuda. He looked back on his life in Britain for the BBC fairly recently, and said this:

"England was the easiest country to get into and the hardest country to get out of, for the mere fact is if you working, you never earn enough money for your fare, but at the same time you always say you always have another ten year, 15-20 years. You get yourself involved and things.

"I have spent most of my life in England, I have travelled quite a lot on the continent of Africa, and I went to Liberia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and North America. But England has something that you want to get back to; you can't put your finger on it.

"There is a racism, but it's up to the individual, how you counteract it. The fact is, if a man say you are a black so and so, you can't say you are a white so and so. If you even get to fisti-cuffs, the best man win. It's true racism is more prominent with the younger generation, this generation doesn't put up with it, the way we as old colonials come here and accept it. Violence is part of the society today, and people will say the black man does that, but they never give the reasons he does it."

The reasons he does it are, in large part, Linton Kwesi Johnson's territory as a younger generation poet.

?when yu jack mi up gense di wall

I didn't bawl

but I did warn yu.

now yu si fire burning in mi eye

smell badness pan me bret

feel vialence, vialence,

burtsin outta mi;

look out!

it too late now:

I did warn yu.

That's taken from a poem called Time Come, written in the Seventies. I should explain that dub poetry is poetry spoken (chanted is probably more like it) over a reggae beat. Linton Kwesi Johnson is as much a music maker as he is a poet, and he has unusual skill at both.

All writers have to take metre into account in what they write ? if they want to be any good at it, that is. Eloquence is the magic that words can conjure up if they are allowed to say just what they mean, in a context designed to fall rhythmically on the listener's, or the reader's, ear.

West Indian patois is attractive at least in part because West Indians are always able to take the rhythms their words throw up into account, when they choose them. West Indian poets, one would think, would be more attuned than most, therefore, to metre.

Certainly, you have to listen only once to Linton Kwesi Johnson intone, over a driving reggae beat?

?beg yu call a physician

fi di poor opposition

dem gat no ammunition

an dem gat no position

we're di forces af victri

an wi comin rite through

we're di forces af victri

now what yu gonna do!

?to understand that you're listening to a marriage of words and music made in poetry heaven. I may be prejudiced, but I think it makes rap sound as thin and insignificant as dirty dishwater. That excerpt, by the way, is taken from a poem called Forces of Victri. This comes from Di Great Insohreckshan, written at about the same time:

it woz in april nineteen eighty wan

doun inna di ghetto of Brixtan

dat di babylan dem cauz such a frickshan

dat it bring about a great insohreckshan

an it spread all owevah di naeshan

it woz truly an histarical occayshan

it woz event af di year

an I wish I ad been dere

wen wi run riat all owevah Brixtan

wen we mash-up plenty police van

wen we mash-up di wicked wan plan

wen wi mash-up di Swamp Eighty Wan

fi wha?

fi mek di rulah dem andastan

dat wi naw tek noh more a dem oppreshan

LKJ's early poetry was full of references to fighting with the police, riots in Brixton, rage, murder, mayhem and 'insohreckshan'. They were important elements in the lives of young black people in the Britain of that day.

Also, reggae was a big part of the British music scene by the time he began writing, in the Seventies. Homegrown bands like Aswad and Steel Pulse had a big following. But people also listened to music imported from Jamaica ? LKJ talks about Big Youth, I-Roy, U-Roy, General Sind and Clint Eastwood as being particular favourites of his.

By using that music, therefore, and by writing about the difficulties life posed for young blacks in Britain, he became a star. And because his themes were universal, he was a crossover star, achieving a following not just on that side of the Atlantic, but in Jamaica as well. On the way, he achieved recognition of a kind other poets, no matter how good they are, never dream of.

But he's as much a man living everyman's life as the rest of us. In a much more recent, long poem called Tings and Times, he noodles around a bit about?well, about success and change, I suppose, as measured by a black man in Britain:

now dat wi create some space

an nuff a wi own a likkle place

now dat wi gat wi mp an wi black jp

blacks pan di radio

blacks pan tee vee

wi sir and wi laad and wi mbe

a figat we figat ar a it dat?...

sometimes di pungent owedah of decay

signal seh bran new life deh pan di way

The Guyanese-born writer Fred D'Aguiar wrote about Linton Kwesi Johnson in a preface to the selection of poems published in 2001 by Penguin. I lifted this fragment from his piece:

"He achieves a double mission in his poetry, as a defender of Britain's black working class and as the foremost critic of recalcitrant elements in some aspects of youth behaviour. His poems are the conscience of the country, since he tests the civility of the nation by its capacity to co-exist with the other: those who are in it, but thought to be not of it."

@EDITRULE:

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