Activity: Poetry readings, book launch
Co-ordinator: Moray House Trust
Date: 30th March 2012
“The Comfort of All Things” a collection of 67 poems written by the distinguished Caribbean poet and man of letters, Dr Ian McDonald, is the first book produced and published by the Moray House Trust and launched on the premises in Georgetown in March 2012. The occasion was celebrated by a group of young readers, some of them writers themselves, who read poems from the book that they had selected themselves. Ian McDonald has been writing poetry since he was a teenager and The Comfort of All Things is his fifth collection of poems, written over the past four years, “a handful a year.”.
His poems in this volume range from contemplations inspired by the ancient philosopher-poets, Horace and Lucretius to tributes to the young Brian Lara and to Frank Collymore, the editor and poet to the marvels of the universe seen through the eye of the Hubble telescope, the list of Ralegh’s police dossier including maps of Guiana and a gold souvenir, wisdoms of the extraordinary working people that he has encountered over the years; the watchman of the seawall koker, a cobbler, workers in the ice factory, an ageing goat boy, a differently-abled child afraid of losing the sun, even an estate mule whose gold-flecked eyes still “punch his heart”. Many of these carefully crafted poems contemplate mortality, but most are celebratory of the joy, wonder and beauty of the world epitomized in his prayer-like wish to be born a painter in his next life so as to do justice to the magnificence of the Essequibo. The suite of “garden poems”, fragments, as he calls them, that chronicle various elements of his wife Mary’s exquisite garden — a labour of love in its own right — are like haiku in their powers of observation, elegance and poise.
“Antiguan by ancestry, Trinidadian by birth, Guyanese by adoption, West Indian by conviction.” This was how Ian McDonald was described by the late David de Caires in a hand-written note and quoted by Brendan de Caires in his excellent Introduction. A prominent figure in the Guyana and Caribbean sugar industry for some fifty years and an international lawn tennis player in his youth, he has also written extensively on marketing, finance and the woes of “free trade” with its consequences for the Caribbean. He is a life-long lover of West Indies cricket and regularly writes on the subject. His newspaper column “Ian on Sunday” has been a centerpiece of the Stabroek News Sunday edition since 1988, and a collection of these essays, A Cloud Of Witnesses, is a 2012 title in the Guyana Classics series published of the Caribbean Press. The Hummingbird Tree, his novel of growing up in Trinidad, made into a film by the BBC in 1992, has been a set text on the English Literature syllabus. He won the Guyana Prize for Literature twice for Essequibo in 1992 and Between Silence and Silence in 2004. He has been a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature since 1970.
An Evening of Poetry with Ian Mc Donald – Video Clips
Part 1: Opening Remarks at the launch of ‘The Comfort of All Things’. Vanda Radzik, Chair of Directors at Moray House Trust reads a letter from Joe Singh in which he celebrates this addition to ‘the long and honourable tradition of local publishing’.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTk0JlCetH4
Part 2: David Dabydeen pays tribute to Ian Mc Donald as ‘the poet of our landscape’ and ‘an ideas man’.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yvl4-h9zFS0
Part 3: “A Sense of Something Needing to be Said”. Ian Mc Donald talks about his poems.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnBIF_8wafE
Part 4: “An Offering of Unfinished Versions”. Ian Mc Donald reads a selection of his poems.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWZqEygA8aU
Part 5: Recital of poems: a recital of Ian Mc Donald’s poems.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWrBXlebhtI
Part 6: Recital of poems (part 2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXJFw7W4Zpw
Part 7: Closing remarks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LJCeKOOghY