Dear Editor,
Award winning historian, Professor Emeritus Clem Seecharan, will be launching his latest book, “Joe Solomon and the Spirit of Port Mourant” on Thursday at Bourda. This book recently won Clem the Guyana Prize for Literature in the non-fiction category. I have heard Clem speak before, most notably at the Sixteenth Frank Worrell Memorial Lecture in Barbados in 2011, and at his acceptance of an honorary Doctor of Letters in Trinidad in 2017. That is quite apart from the innumerable times we have talked in over sixty five years of friendship. I can promise those who attend this launch that they are in for a treat.
More will be written about this book by others better qualified than me to lead the discourse on the multitudinous topics Clem managed to weave into his narrative. The scholarship runs deep. The volume of research is huge and multidimensional. The analyses are solid, always based on the evidence. His insights are clear and persuasive. And his writing is brilliant. Editor, for full disclosure, Clem mentioned me in the book and included my poem, “Man of the First Tied Test Match” in Chapter Eight, which he introduced with a poem by Ian McDonald, titled, “The Throw” and which he concluded with mine.
But, Editor, this book while focused on Joe Solomon, is much more than Joe Solomon’s biography or about the famous Tied Test of 1960. When Clem first ran the idea of a book on Joe, I privately wondered if there would be enough material to do the type of scholarly tome that is Clem’s academic hallmark. Well, there was! Trust Clem to find it. The book is 462 pages long, and I believe that readers will be immersed in the same intellectual animation one gets from reading CLR James’ “Beyond A Boundary”. I know that’s high praise but please check it out for yourself!
Sincerely,
Tulsi Dyal Singh MD