By what values should we strive to live in order to achieve a community in which differences are accommodated, a community where there is diversity of discourse but a recognition of the common good regardless of politics, religion, race and personal beliefs?
Someone read a column of mine and meeting me asked “What do you see in poetry, Ian?
I regret, if not exactly deplore, the cancerous growth of the shorter versions of the great game.
In Guyana education once deteriorated to the point where parents had little confidence that the formal system would or could produce results.
I am sometimes accused by bloggers, and often gently told by friends, that I am inclined to view life, and particularly life in Guyana, through a glass not darkly but beautifully rose-coloured.
A day is dulled and dimmed if it passes and I do not pick up a book of poems in my library, browse in some anthology, find a new poem in the latest issue of Poetry Review or The New Yorker or some other magazine or at least before my eyes shut glance at some old favourite lines from Hopkins, Walcott, Yeats, Carter or a score of other supreme masters of the art and craft of making poems.
I am reproached for writing too much about death. Please seek a less morbid subject, I am urged.
Politicians love to praise themselves or arrange for others to praise them.
If you think about it carefully it seems impossible to reconcile two things which most people would very much like to believe – one, that they enjoy free will and in some ultimate sense are masters of their fates, and, two, that the God of all creation is omnipotent and has a master plan for us all which is beneficial.
Nothing can compare with the beauty and warmth of life at home.
Many people go to the ends of the earth to find beauty.
Cricket lovers like myself have been shocked to learn that Lords, widely recognized as the home of cricket, is to be converted into a site for Cirque du Soleil for part of the year and England’s premier arena for Ultimate Fighting tournaments in the summer months.
In Guyana reciprocated animosity has not even come close to plumbing the awful depths which exist in so many other countries and, God willing, such hideous animosity never will prevail.
The insights of others continually add to our understanding of what is going on and how the world works.
My heart has grown heavy and heavier yet in recent times, as I have contemplated what seems to be the gradual fading of the dream of West Indian unity.
When I was asked by Cricinfo to join the panel choosing an all-time West Indies Cricket XI my first inclination was to decline.
The work of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1953) is hardly known to English-speaking peoples.
In a vibrant democracy elections should be a cause for celebration, an ever welcome occasion regularly marking the successful outcome of what in any country’s history has always been a long struggle to overcome authoritarian, and often brutal, rule.
When I was young I showed an aptitude for games. After a lot of hard practice I played tennis best, but I was also for my age a fair centre-half in football, I was a good swimmer, I could hold my own among the athletes especially in middle-distance running, and I played reasonably good games of table tennis and badminton.
It is frustrating, not to say humiliating, to think how much one is missing by not knowing any language except one’s own.
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