Poet who brought the speech patterns of Jamaica to Britain, where his anthologies of black verse were widely read
James Berry, who has died aged 92, was one of the best loved and most taught poets in Britain, a great champion of Caribbean culture, an influential anthologist and a determined though unsentimental advocate of friendship between races. His poems ranged from the lyrical to the caustic, but almost all of them intimately caught the speech patterns of his native Jamaica.
Berry helped to enrich and diversify the capacities of the English language, making conversational modes of West Indian expression, which a previous generation would have considered exotic or barely literate, normal and easily understood. In doing so he gave literary respectability to forms of language increasingly heard in the streets and playgrounds of multicultural Britain.
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