Anthony McNeill Biography

Jamaican poet, born in St Andrew, near Kingston, Jamaica, educated at Nassau Community College, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Massachusetts. He has worked as a journalist and a university teacher and was Assistant Director of Publications for the Institute of Jamaica from 1976 to 1981. His principal collections of poetry are Hello Ungod (1971), Reel from ‘The Life-Movie’ (1975), and Credences at the Altar of Cloud (1979). Much of his work makes highly imaginative use of vivid natural imagery in the creation of disquieting treatments of socially and psychologically alienated states. His disciplined free verse combines rhythmical suggestions of Jamaica's oral traditions with the Standard English in which his work is chiefly written. With Neville Dawes, he edited The Caribbean Poem (1976), an anthology of verse by fifty West Indian poets.