Click here to access the poetry recordings of James Berry as well as a brief biography of this author.

James Berry's (b. 1924) poems take you back to the noises, sights and smells of his Jamaican childhood. James was born in 1924 in a small village surrounded by fields and fruit trees. His poems also celebrate what he calls the 'Everyday Music' of village life - the sounds of birds and farmyard animals, the wind and rain of tropical storms, the laughter of family and friends and, above all, the songs and stories he heard all around him. From this page, you can hear the voice of James Berry reading four of his poems, "Childhood Tracks," "Trick a Duppy," "Seashell," and "Isn't my name magical?"

Poetry Archive exists to help make poetry accessible, relevant and enjoyable to a wide audience. It came into being as a result of a meeting, in a recording studio, between Andrew Motion, soon after he became U.K. Poet Laureate in 1999, and the recording producer, Richard Carrington. They agreed about how enjoyable and illuminating it is to hear poets reading their work and about how regrettable it was that, even in the recent past, many important poets had not been properly recorded.

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