Not Quite Without A Moon

Ian McDonald’s Collected Poems (2018) was marked by a late flush of exceptional new poems that addressed both the infirmities of ageing as well as its continuing joys. That flow of memory has continued, addressing a long, rich life from a childhood in Antigua, youth in Trinidad and an adult life lived in Guyana. It was not to be halted by anything as malleable as the word “collected”, and this collection of poems from the past four years is more than just a “brawta” to bring back from the market to enjoy. There is the mystery of why certain memories, dormant for decades, suddenly emerge, like a childhood nightmare still as real 80 years later, or how in one’s own elder years, recollections of one’s parents take on a pertinence and vividness of presence. But it is not merely the past that revisits but an immersion in the present that has never been more real and precious in every respect. If the world has become, increasingly, one’s house and garden, its inhabitants one’s wife, children and grandchildren, it is experienced as not a jot less rich than anything in the past –indeed ever more precious for its evanescence.

Ian McDonald was born in Trinidad in 1933. He read History at Cambridge and was a gifted tennis player and captained the Cambridge, Guyana and West Indies Davis Cup teams. He first went to Guyana in 1955 and was Director of Bookers and then of the Guyana Sugar Industry and then CEO of the Sugar Association of the Caribbean. A long-time columnist for the Stabroek News, he is the author of ten books of poetry, a novel, The Hummingbird Tree (a BBC Drama), and has edited two major anthologies of West Indian writing. He lives in Guyana.