[Ian McDonald, Not Quite Without A Moon, Leeds, UK, Peepal Tree Press, 2023. 91pp. £9.99]
About poetry there are many cliches, as every amateur expounds on “poetry in motion”, while every theorist since Aristotle has not quite defined it as the rarest of beautiful things. But for Ian McDonald anything can make a poem, as he transforms into poetry every chance encounter, any plain object, each forest evening of blazing colour disappearing into night, the sight of a pale half moon, a glass of rum or ordinary drinking water, and every single experience by which life can be celebrated.
And indeed, McDonald celebrates life – the value of it and every human experience converted into verse in yet another collection of new poems, the unending output of an exceptional career, hailed by Jeremy Poynting as “gifts that have been cultivated by a long life of writing”. As a writer of incredible prolificity, McDonald subscribes to the view, shared by many poets, that poems are not his; he is merely the recipient of what comes to him in sometimes epiphanic, sometimes miraculous fashion, and which he shapes and presents to the readers.
We are thus able to receive from McDonald an additional flow of new verse in a long life of writing appropriately expressed by Poynting as a “brawta”, an extra gift packaged in this publication. Not Quite Without A Moon (Peepal Tree, 2023) is the eleventh of twelve books of poetry by McDonald, containing poems written in the four year period between 2018 and 2021. This celebration of an amazing output was crowned with the award of the Guyana Prize for Literature Best Book of Poetry 2023.
Ian McDonald was born in Trinidad and Tobago where he attended Queens Royal College and afterwards read History at Cambridge before settling in Guyana. He was an executive in Bookers, then in the Guyana Sugar Industry and the Sugar Association of the Caribbean. He played tennis at Wimbledon, captained Cambridge and Guyana as well as the West Indies in the Davis Cup in a very long career in sports. He is a weekly columnist for the Sunday Stabroek. His poetry reflects a full life and a passion for reading out of which this unending flow of verses continue, and which was further rewarded by the conferral of an Honorary Doctorate by the UWI.
He is also a novelist, playwright, essayist, editor and anthologist, whose play Tramping Man (1969) remains a foundation text in Guyanese drama first performed at the Theatre Guild in its heyday. His novel The Humming Bird Tree (1969) based on his growing up in Trinidad, was made into a BBC film in 1992. He edited the journal Kyk-over-Al and two anthologies of poetry, including the poems of Martin Cater with Stewart Brown and the Collected Poems of AJ Seymour with Jacqueline De Weever, in addition to four non-fiction publications.
Not Quite Without A Moon comes at the tail-end of this extraordinary achievement of lived experience out of which the poems have flowed in a Wordsworthian “overflow of powerful feelings” and a document of Guyanese contemporary poetry in the twenty first century. It is fairly conventional free verse with only a few representing the experiments in Mervyn Morris-like brevity found in his smaller volumes Poems For Mary and Mary’s Garden. Yet the love poems to his wife that dominate those minor collections continue in Not Quite Without A Moon in which McDonald’s concept of poetry abounds in personal devotion and the most precious moments of tenderness, love and dedication to wife and to family.
McDonald has a firm command of language and a marked power of description. These qualities help since so many poems are statements. In most cases there are no surprise endings or twists in final lines. They make a point without flamboyance or clever five finger exercises with complex versification. There is the occasional one that startles with its brilliance of poetry. Yet always the language is deep.
The volume has four sections over which these selections are distributed and in which the poet reflects on love, family, professional life, tennis, very special persons, a concern for the people, memoirs, landscape, nature, childhood, ageing, intimations of mortality and existential deliberations. He takes comfort in small things, sees worth and value in details and observations that those “dull of soul” would “pass by”, yet he sustains severe examinations of himself and questions his own values in searching observations and admonitions of self.
Several poems go back to McDonald’s childhood in very vivid memories of both his mother and his father in passionately painted pictures of love, protection, guidance and the shaping of his life, ethics and values. Memories are preserved in clear images, some more than eighty years old but indelible in the poet’s mind and worthy of new poems. He considers himself made stronger and ennobled by the fortress of home and the experience of family. He tells love stories of his parents parallelled by those of himself and his own wife flourishing generations later.
The childhood memories also carry a very strong sense of place as there are clear snapshots and recreated atmosphere of St Augustine in Trinidad or of beaches in Antigua all reflecting a life well lived enriched by home and family. Readers sense the old versions of sub-urban Trinidad mixed with wholesome images of home-made bread and butter, fresh milk, fruits and vegetables from nearby rural farms and gardens. There is, however, an accompanying recognition of social class and their relative roles, with the poet’s privileged family served by old fashioned workers of the peasant and labouring classes.
In this way there is a slight suggestion of social succession with the poet’s current home in suburban Georgetown and his current family of wife, sons and grandson mirroring images of his childhood setting. The ageing poet passes on to the next generation very much the goodness bequeathed to him by his own parents. The poems present the McDonald home in Bel Air Gardens as a replica of St Augustine, the pastoral feel of the good life with recurring portraits of family and household help. Then again, there is his concern for humanity’. There are poems arising out of his work in the sugar industry, which are marked by their proletarian sensibilities – deep thoughts about the welfare of the working class on the payroll of the sugar company in which he was a director.
The sense of place continues in several poems celebrating the ever romantic presence of nurturing nature as the poet revels in the comradeship of trees, fresh flowers and birds of all descriptions in riotous glory.
There is a certain sensuality that pervades these recollections of close encounters with the pastoral, with natural surroundings, and always the mention of flowers, birds, fruits and vegetables. The poet celebrates an abundance of life just as much in the wild of the forest, sometimes the sea in youthful memoirs of vigorous indulgence.
Yet this abundant joy seems always tempered by that constant reminder of time and mortality so prevalent in McDonald’s poetry. Youthful revelry and celebration are balanced in these poems by themes of ageing and the debilitating ravages of time. the poet just as often reflects on these in his accounts of a series of persons – friends, relatives or chance acquaintances as well as in accounts of himself. There is very often a frank outspokenness where this is concerned.
Weaknesses and frailties of age move to the fore of McDonald’s mind as frequently as profound thoughts of existence in a poet who is an existentialist. He has lived and experienced this nagging mutability that he personally feels and writes about. Yet it might be another way of giving full expression to a long rewarding and fulfilling life well lived. Interestingly, it might well be another kind of celebration.
Not Quite Without A Moon is marked by a poet’s sensitivity to the uncommon, and his sharp sense of perception and observation. It is this that allows him to see poetry in what is hardly noticed. Here is a volume not striking for its brilliant versification, but outstanding as the creations of a poet who will “drink life to the lees”. He toasts the joys of living with a poem as he does in equal delight with a glass of good rum.
