Dear Editor,
It was a magnificent setting ‒ Marlborough House the home of the Commonwealth Secretariat across the road from St James’ Palace in London’s posh clubland. A long way from Georgetown but Guyana was ever present as two of the prize winners, Grace Nichols and Maggie Harris launched their new books of poetry: The Insomnia Poems and short stories Writing on Water. This was a small but select gathering, including for a short while Baroness Patricia Scotland, the Commonwealth Secretary General, Keith Waithe the flautist, and Grace’s husband the equally renowned Anglo-Guyanese poet, Johnny Agard.
Maggie Harris had come via New Amsterdam, Broadstairs Kent and Wales to Marlborough House. Her book of poetry Sixty years of Loving won the Guyana Prize in 2015. This year, it was her short stories collected together. She read from two ‘Sending for Chantal’ which won the Commonwealth Short Story prize in 2014 and ‘Breast’. Both full of emotion, both full of her Guyanese childhood.
Grace Nichols brought Guyana home even more with her poem ‘The Long Haul’ recalling her early days of courting with Agard on the Essequibo coast.
The flickering candlefly
Sensing that
My flitting-days were over
This was the first time she had read a love poem for him with him in the room. He blushed.
Her theme was insomnia from which she had always suffered, and the thought and dreams it brought to her head including a paean of praise to Stanley Greaves whose painting Morning Mango adorned her book cover
For it was the mango, my love
That tempted you to bite its blush
Manifera Indica, that first stirred
The branches of our blood
The greed of your mouth
Grace is now the doyenne of the great Guyanese writers exiled in the United Kingdom. This, her first book of poetry for seven years, must surely be in the running for the next Guyana Prize later this year, as will be Maggie Harris’ collection.
It may have been a balmy early summer evening in St James’ London but the spirit was far, far away in the lands of Berbice, Demerara and Essequibo. El Dorado in Pall Mall.
Yours faithfully,
John ‘Bill Cotton/Reform’ Mair
