Acts of Kindness
Family visiting, cousins from the old days,
hadn’t been back for forty years, refugees
from the bad days of nothing in the shops,
fear of always being below, no future for the children,
they with gifts, brought back memories,
then it was bare food my wife didn’t have;
now it was a tablecloth wonderfully embroidered
and, for me, bottles of Niagara wine. They were
lovely.
We gave them a good time, laughter and memories.
When they left, my wife lamented, Not Enough.
Next morning, I found her in the garden
Preparing a big basket of lettuce, fruits, herbs,
bunches of flowers to send where they were staying
in Industry, where they had lived so long ago,
where my wife endured her sad memories.
I feel better, my wife said. Kindness filled their lives.
– Ian McDonald
[Ian McDonald, Poems For Mary, Canada, MiddleRoad Publishers, 2020. 73pp]
Ian McDonald, poet, novelist, playwright, editor, anthologist, company director, sportsman, tennis player and cricket analyst, has so far reveled in a full and extraordinary life. His achievements have extended into a meritorious contribution to Guyanese and West Indian life. He has come from a privileged background and existence through the most prestigious education, and is able to trace quite a noble lineage of ancestors.
As a writer, he has been exceptionally prolific over the most recent years, with two new publications in 2020 alone: Inheritance: The Story of a West Indian Family (Paria Publishing Company Ltd, 2020) – a documentation of the lives of many of those distinguished and colourful ancestors; and Poems for Mary (Canada, MiddleRoad Publishers, 2020) – a collection of poems for his wife, Mary McDonald.
While for the ancestors he provides biography with meticulous details, for Mary, it is quite different. Many poems were inspired by her – McDonald explains, “I have written poems for her, about her, with her in mind and situations in which her presence was deeply felt” and “I have collected such poems in this book”.
About famous people, WH Auden declares that “a shilling life will give you all the facts”, but Poems for Mary is not a shilling life. It does not list famous details or factual documentation. It gives a full picture of its subject, but not what you will get in any magazine or biographical leaflet purchased for a shilling. Unlike Inheritance, biographical information is scarce; there is little or no documentation of Mary’s life before marriage, her family or her background, outside of vague references in a few poems. In “Acts of Kindness” we can pick up that she lived in Industry. A few others bait the curious with possible implications. But McDonald gives a thorough portrait of his wife in this collection of verse. Among other things he focuses on her with images of love and family, togetherness and devotion. She seems indivisible from those qualities.
As a poet, McDonald is preoccupied with several themes and interests. These include autobiography, life experiences, love, literature, the Essequibo rainforests, river and interior landscape, birds, family life, the poet’s sons, and his wife’s home garden. But his work is overwhelmed by the subject of poetry. While writing about poetry is readily compatible with writing about Mary, the poems are also overwhelmed by McDonald’s preoccupation with mortality, ageing and mutability, which perpetually invades the love poems. While throughout his work there is driving concern for the vigour, the powerful energy of living, there is a persistent reminder of life’s temporality and its always approaching end. However, consistent with the continuing love story, is the declaration that one of the things that have sustained him through this is Mary.
McDonald had this to say: “Vibrant young woman came late into my aimless world. She has for very long been a large part of my life. How does one convey in life what clearly means everything? What would a red thing be without the red? Length and breadth without the depth? We say to each other like children “I will love you forever”.
Mary is the poet’s muse, responsible for so many of his poems. The collection is a love story with repeated expressions of marriage and togetherness across the several poems. But there is greater value, wider interest for the reader in a number of deep, engaging poems that stretch the imagination in their confrontation of other issues beyond romance and a satisfied wedded life.
Poetry itself is a major study among the selections since McDonald indulges his insatiable love of the art and of reading; but he goes beyond descriptions of reading into poetry as a philosophy or an undefinable concept as in “Poetry” or “River Dancer”. There are references to poverty and struggle as in “The Matchbox”, “Wild Horses” and “The Starching Iron”, often juxtaposed against the poet/persona’s very privileged life, comfortable existence and overflowing bounty, made richer by the so presented flawless relationship with Mary. It is even mentioned in “River Dancer” in a vague association with his muse and lover. This deepens the poems and makes “The Matchbox” the most moving in the book. It is a profound memory of a treasured gift of a matchbox in contrast to the poet/persona’s home over-brimming with an affluence taken for granted. Outside, the little girl’s one hand touches “the cold and bitter glass”, while in the other she clutches her poverty stricken gift of a matchbox “held tight tight against her breast, /preserved against all fading Christmases long ago”.
“Acts of Kindness” contains more open revelation of Mary’s family and life before marriage than any of the others, and becomes stronger for its subtly and unobtrusive in its references to Guyana’s kind of nationalised poverty in the 1970s and 1980s, and the economic and political push factors that drove so many Guyanese away to foreign lands. Similarly, “Poetry” is a selection of exceptional quality in its complex variety. It interrogates literature and the imagination while remaining a love poem that dramatizes his tender care for Mary. The poem is fortified in its intertextual references to other poets and their work. It stretches the imagination as it recreates Homer, the grandfather of them all, where Mary knitting a sweater becomes a recreation of the patient Penelope knitting and unraveling a shroud as an expression of her love.
Then there is the old-time, old-styled churning of butter which recalls McDonald as a boy in the security of his home in St Augustine, complete with its reference to household servants. That is the poem “The Sound of Making Butter”, that along with those others named above, is among the most memorable in the book.
Poems for Mary incudes several modern poems, experiments with no capital letters, no punctuation marks, especially in the section “Garden Poems” where each tree, each love-nurtured plant expresses itself in short modernistic verse reminiscent of Mervyn Morris.
Morris also just happens to be McDonald’s long-standing friend and fellow tennis player of the days of the Davis Cup and Brandon Cup. This technique, a new and unusual adventure for McDonald, lends the poems an impression of a continuous line of expression and experience unimpeded by punctuation – an outpouring of powerful feeling – unencumbered.
These give eternal life and fortitude to the poems even as they set out to create fame and immortality for Mrs Mary McDonald.