Attunement of the senses 
Who has an eye for Nature’s beauteous forms
And lends an ear to trap her melody,
Will see the rose a sudden scarlet brush
When shyly bursting forth in dewy morn;
Observe the riotous splash of colour spilled
Across the palest blue of Heaven’s dome;
Will harken to the noise of kneeling grass
Which furious, fitful winds keep trampling o’er;
Will hear the symphony of weeping skies
Euphoniously played on tresses green;
Will smell the dampness of the rain-scoured earth
And deep inhale the fragrance of its flowers;
Will taste the freshness of the laughing brook
And smack the lips in sheer delight of being;
Will feel a oneness with Divinity,
Dynamic; indivisible; serene;
All these and more perceived and understood
Is proof . . . clear proof . . . the senses are attuned.
Frank E. Dalzell (Prize-winning poem British Guiana, 1946)
The reprint of several titles in Guyanese literature and history by the Caribbean Press between 2009 and 2013 did invaluable service to Caribbean literature. This included the publication of many new and emerging writers, the publication of a number of significant works, the reprint of old treasures that might otherwise have been obscured under the dust of history, and important titles that had gone out of print.
Indeed, the intention of the press, through its Guyana Classics Library, was to “republish out-of-print poetry, novels and travelogues so as to remind us of our literary heritage, and it will also remind us of our reputation for scholarship in the fields of history, anthropology, sociology and politics. . . The series builds upon other Guyanese endeavours, like the institution of Carifesta and the Guyana Prize.” (Series Preface)
The preface itself contains moments of literary analysis in language and thought as beautiful as the literature it published, particularly in its weighing of the literary treasures in the same measures as the glistering gold and sugar crystals have been valued in the nation’s history. Sir Walter Ralegh “was as beguiled by Guiana’s landscape (‘I never saw a more beautiful country…’) as he was by the prospect of plunder (‘every stone we stooped to take up promised either gold or silver by his complexion’). Raleigh’s contemporaries, too, were doubly inspired, writing, as Thoreau said, of Guiana’s ‘majestic forests’, but also of its earth, ‘resplendent with gold.’ By the eighteenth century, when the trade in Africans was in full swing, writers cared less for Guiana’s beauty than for its mineral wealth. Sugar was the poet’s muse . . .”
The narrative continues “. . .there was no contradiction between the manufacture of odes and that of sugar . . . The refinement of art and that of sugar were one and the same process.”
The press proceeded to turn out the country’s wealth in poetry, novels and travelogue in volumes that included a concentration in different phases on the Guyana Classics, new works, and winners of the Guyana Prize. The Caribbean Press was discontinued in 2015.
The reprints in the Guyana Classics series are to be noted among its achievements. The editors were David Dabydeen and Lynne Macedo, with Ian McDonald as consulting editor. This initiative has rendered a service to literature that may be compared to the contributions in 1970 when the Kraus Reprints out of Germany republished a number of Caribbean classics that had gone out of print and probably out of memory. Those included the whole collection of Trinidadian works first published by the Beacon group in the 1930s, as well as Guianese works from the same period by N E Cameron, such as The Evolution of the Negro and the anthology of Guianese Poetry 1831 – 1931.
Dabydeen and Macedo did the same for Guiana’s own beacon of the 1940s – the incomparable journal Kyk-Over-Al. Copies of the early volumes of this magazine are like the stones “we stooped to take up” which “promised either gold or silver”, very rare treasures. The reprint of these in the Classics Library series makes it possible for Guyanese to “appreciate our monumental achievement in moving from exploitation to expression”. This makes the volumes much more accessible to readers, to archives and very especially to researchers. It brings decades of Guyanese literature all in one place and one volume. To add to the value of these reprints of Kyk-Over-Al, Michael Niblett provides a scholarly introduction which adds another chapter to the study of Guyanese literature. It places the journal in the history and development of literature, always providing a better understanding of what one reads in those volumes.
In Kyk-Over-Al Issue 3, December 1946, A J Seymour writes that the quality of verse is high, and “that British Guiana’s verse of yesterday and today is good and comparable”. He says this while making reference to the selections published in 1946 as well as poetry from elsewhere in the Caribbean, such as the work of Philip Sherlock (Jamaica), alongside selections from Leo published in 1883. He quotes a description of Egbert Martin in 1886 as “far and away the first West Indian poet”.
In looking at the volumes of Kyk, it is possible to put all of this in the context of literature, its history and background. For example, one of the 1946 selections is featured with high praise as an example of the poetry that is of “high quality”, that is “good and comparable”. This is “Attunement of the Senses” by Frank E Dalzell. It was the 1946 first prize winner of the national poetry competition sponsored by the British Guiana Union of Cultural Clubs.
The poem is published in Kyk Issue 3 along with other poems, so it is easy to examine it in the context of the poetry of the times, especially since the reprints also include poems in other issues of Kyk from 1945 and after.
Dalzell’s “Attunement of the Senses” is a creature of its time. Its characteristics are not exclusively Guyanese but are typical of the verses written by West Indians in colonies around the region. It is neat and carefully crafted but reflects the general tendency of poets of the period to imitate the English verse of the Romantics and the Victorians. Dalzell’s opening lines recall John Keats’ “Ode To Autumn” or other nature poems of the nineteenth century. The language is loyal to the poetic verses of those times with their clear notion of what is good poetic diction and references to the landscape.
It is the typical landscape poetry of this persuasion. Its strong suit is its call upon the senses as it traces suitable imagery, including the Keatsian, to appeal to each of the senses. It largely articulates a keen sensitivity to nature not unlike the impassioned pleadings of Wordsworth. It echoes the romantic investment in nature as divine, as spiritual force – Dalzell declares that one “will feel a oneness with Divinity” in a poem advocating the romantic poet’s quest for empathy.
While this is one type strongly represented in the poetry of British Guiana in 1946, literature was manifesting other developments. Volume 3 of Kyk-Over-Al printed a few of these. James W Smith turns to landscape in “To A Dead Silk-Cotton Tree”, which is, however, rooted in local references and identity. Wilson Harris, in “Words Written Before Sunset”, has a strong sense of independence and departs from what was typically poetic to the Victorians in a demonstration of modernist verse. Both Seymour and Edgar Mittelholzer reflect an ideology at that time new to the literature. “Tomorrow Belongs To The People” and “For Me The Backyard” demonstrate some of the progress made in pre-independence Guyanese poetry, indicative even of post-colonialism.
All these characteristics may be discerned in the samples of Guyanese pre-independence literature. It was the time when Mittelholzer had established and set on course social realism in the novel that was to grow in strength by the time of independence through Carew and Kempadoo to Richmond and Heath.
Poetry was advancing from the imitation to the nationalisation of landscape in the strong patriotic verse of Walter Mac A Lawrence, to the growing nationalism that began to give poetry a recognisable Guyanese identity. Meanwhile, strong individual talents with varieties of originality were emerging in the likes of Harris and Helen Taitt.
Those are some of the great rewards to be reaped in a study of literature through the Guyana Classics reprints. These volumes of Kyk become immediately accessible to enable easier research just as the magazine itself enabled the deepening and advancement of Guyanese literature and consciousness.
