Ian McDonald

It was exciting to play a small part in Cheddi Jagan’s very big life.

I am honoured to have been awarded the Guyana Prize for Literature (Poetry) for my book of poems Not Quite Without A Moon.

Sparks from the central fire – I was lucky to be near enough to feel the blaze these men ignited in the world.

Even at 90 treasures are available in what one reads. ●             There is a scene in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence when the lovers, Ellen Olenska and Newland Archer, meet in the old Metropolitan Museum in New York in a deserted room containing antique fragments from vanished llium.

He is the master spirit who once lived in our midst.

One man is running a company with the help of three old family retainers, two others who haven’t had a new idea in a couple of generations, and a whole raft of school drop-outs.

For a short while one summer day out of nowhere in my life she flashed like a comet across my sky.

At thirteen, I think it was, I was reading love poetry.

From almost the first day I arrived in Guyana in 1955 I got to know Martin Carter.

These are no more than sparks snatched from the fire of their lives – encounters with men who were most memorable in my life.

It is extremely important that you pay attention to what today’s column says if you wish to live a longer, healthier, more alert and happier life.

When you get to 90 you are in overtime and a penalty shoot-out looms which you know you cannot win.

I am filled with sadness.  My old and dear friend Joe Solomon, great cricketer, great man indeed, has died. 

In a long life I have read the books and been taught the deeds and studied the scholarship and seen the art of the famous in many great countries of the world.

Joseph Brodsky, the great Russian poet who died at the sadly young age of 56, on receiving his Nobel Prize in the Grand Hall of the Swe-dish Academy in Stockholm in December, 1987, declared a great truth: “There is no doubt in my mind that, should we have been choosing our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programmes, there would be much less grief on earth.”

I do not get the impression that the governance of the world is good or that it is getting better.

It isn’t an exercise that makes much sense to try and rank poets in a sort of hierarchy of greatness.

I long ago became convinced about two major things. They simplified the days that pass so quickly.

I have in mind compiling a book of brief pen portraits of Extraordinary People I have been fortunate to know in my long life – at least, a selected number of them since , to tell the truth, if you know anyone well enough and long enough everyone is remarkable!

I love poetry. It is the quiet passion of my life.