Loquats, the strange Bermudian use of the word ?to?, and water from rooftops were just some of the concepts that baffled Jamaican writer and professor Mervyn Morris when he was asked to select poems for a new Bermudian anthology of poetry.

Still, Mr. Morris said the best poetry shone right through the veil of vernacular.

Mr. Morris read 400 entries and selected 80 of the best for the ?Bermuda Anthology of Poetry? produced by the Ministry of Community & Cultural Affairs. The book was launched at a special reading held at Berkeley Institute last Sunday.

?It was interesting reading 400 entries for the book,? said Mr. Morris who is himself the author of six books of poetry including ?I Been There Sort of? and ?Vestiges?. Mr. Morris is a Rhodes Scholar and has taught at the University of the West Indies since the 1960s.

?Some of them were very attractive immediately,? he said. ?Some I had to think about and some I didn?t like. It is not unusual for me.?

Mr. Morris has judged a number of similar poetry competitions in Jamaica. He said he went a little slower with this book, reading every single entry carefully, because he wanted to learn more about Bermuda.

?I did know right away, in some instances, that a poem wasn?t for the book, but I thought since I was coming here, let me see what is here. So I went right through them all.?

He said the poems had a mostly Caribbean feel to them. There was Caribbean in the obvious sense of palm trees, nature and unhappy love affairs, but also in a deeper sense.

?What makes something distinctively Caribbean is the way in which language is used,? Mr. Morris said.

?That means that very often you get things where the standard English is not used. An example would be ?Ladder to the Aditor? by Arthur DeSilva which I really enjoyed even while being quite sure that there were things I couldn?t quite understand before I heard it read.

?At first there were little things in it which I thought would need to be changed, but I stayed quiet, and learned that some of the things I thought were very strange were actually Bermudian.?

An example of this was the use of the word ?to? as in ?weekends ?to? Aunt Sally?. In other regions ?at? would be used instead of ?to?.

?I thought it was an ordinary mistake,? said Mr. Morris. ?I could tell you also that it didn?t disturb me, but I know nothing about loquats, and there was also a strange spelling of candies, and ?fur? meaning fair. Usually, they were in a context where I knew this was a poem that should go in, but I was asking myself ?what on earth does that mean???

Several months ago Mr. Morris came to Bermuda and did a workshop with some of the poets who were selected for the book. He used that time to ask questions.

?There is no way all the details about a culture would be understood everywhere else,? he said. ?But if you are going to the heart of human relationships, then it is likely to be understood from place to place.?

He said issues of identity, class, religion and landscape appeared over and over again in the Bermudian poems he read. He was also surprised by the number of poems about incest.

?That topic seemed to be coming up more often than I am accustomed to in Jamaica,? he said.

Mr. Morris said he saw evidence of some poetry education in many of the poems, particularly in ones that were picked right off the bat.

?But I also found good things where I would assume they didn?t have a lot of reading experience,? he said. ?But there was something really interesting happening, which was again par for the course.?

Mr. Morris said having a pool of successful writers is not dependent on the size of a place, but on many other factors.

?Not the least of which is something that the anthology will help with, which is the level of legitimacy for the activity that is assumed,? he said. ?That matters. If people are writing and writing and they can?t find anywhere to put their writing then maybe they will write less.

?In Jamaica, at various times, there have been newspapers who have done supplements.

?At the moment we have a Trinidadian writer living in Jamaica, Wayne Brown, who has done a superb job with what he calls the arts magazine. It is short stories and the occasional poem in the Observer. Then two months ago he switched allegiances and he is now doing it for the Gleaner.

?What struck me is that there was a much wider readership for that kind of material than the editors had previously assumed. They just wanted hard news and opinion columns.?

The Bermuda Poetry Anthology was the brain child of Folklife Officer and writer Dr. Kim Dismont Robinson. She was thrilled to have Mr. Morris in Bermuda.

?This is actually considered part of our artist-in-residence programme,? she said. ?Because (our department) is Cultural Affairs there are so many arts that we are focusing on. Right now we recognise that there is both the need and the desire for the community to focus on the literary arts.

?So, I don?t think this will be the last project of this type. We are just waiting to see. I would certainly like to be involved in more. This is right up my alley.?

She is hoping to start a fiction project next year, but funding is not yet finalised.

?It is in possibility land,? she said.

Dr. Robinson?s speciality in university was Caribbean literature, so she got to know Mr. Morris? work through this avenue.

?When we were thinking about an editor for this anthology, we wanted someone who would have a tremendous amount of experience and really impeccable credentials so they could do a combination artist-in-residence and give a reading and workshops and a bit of everything,? she said.

She wanted an editor from the Caribbean because she thought they would be especially sensitive to the nuances of Island writing.

?So we had a short list we had come up with,? she said. ?Ron Lightbourne who gave a pre-workshop for this anthology is a former student of Mervyn?s.

?I said, let?s do it, and we asked and we were really happy when Mervyn said yes. To have a writer of his calibre involved in a project like this is great for the Island.?

A few of the writers included in the book are Dr. Robinson, Lee Ann Liles, Jane Downing, Denise DeMoura, DaMaris Hill, Cha?Von K. Clarke and others.

The book will be on sale at the Department of Community & Cultural Affairs, The Bermuda Bookstore Ltd., The Bookmart, The Book Cellar, True Reflections and Washington Mall Magazines.

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