“I don’t write poems,” said Stanley Greaves last Thursday, “Poems write me.”

Artist and poet Stanley Greaves during the reading hosted at Castellani House last Thursday. (Photo by Aubrey Crawford)

It may sound esoteric but it was both a confession and a statement of fact by the acclaimed artist, who was at the time addressing an audience at Castellani House, where he spoke about both his poetry and his art.

“It’s very difficult for me to sit down and say I’m going to write a poem about anything,” Greaves noted. However, he explained that he has been writing for as long as he has been a visual artist but only bothered to have his work published at the urging of friend and colleague, University of Birmingham Professor Stewart Brown, who used his influence to help him get his work out.

Horizons, Greaves’ first collection of poems, was published in 2002 and won the Guyana Prize for Literature. His recently published collection, The Poems Man, collects 75 poems written over a 30-year period.

The collection, published by Peepal Tree Press, takes its title from a well-known poem by late National Poet Martin Carter, to whom the book is dedicated. Greaves said Carter was one of his mentors. “From Martin, I learned the value of words and the importance of using words very carefully,” he stated.

About the work in the collection, he added that some of them refer specifically to Carter, while others examine the interaction between people and words.

He said the poems were not descriptive or lyrical, but they ask the readers to pay more attention to things of the mind as opposed to things of the eye.

Greaves is more well-known as an artist and he has won wide acclaim for his work.

And it was during a PowerPoint presentation on his latest paintings, which are a continuation of the series “Shadows Move Among Them,” that he made a distinction between his expression through poetry and art. He delivered a lecture on the paintings he has been making over the last year, explaining that while he had expected to move on to something else, his exploration of the subject seemed to trigger more work which he decided to pursue.