Moray House recently hosted an evening of readings from the poetry of Mahadai Das and Mark McWatt by Stanley Greaves and Kathleen Henriquo.
Das was born in Eccles in 1954, and began writing poems while at school, a press release from Moray House Trust said. She was a dancer, actress, beauty queen and served in the Guyana National Service. She later acquired a BA Philosophy from Columbia University, New York and started doctoral studies at the University of Chicago when illness intervened and she returned to Guyana. Das died a decade ago in Barbados after a term of illness. She published several volumes of poetry – I Want to be a Poet of My People (1976), My Finer Steel Will Grow, 1982) and Bones (1988). There was also a posthumous publication of her work, A Leaf in His Ear, of selected poems from 1975-1994. Her work expresses issues of gender, identity, sensuality.
Mark McWatt was born in Georgetown in 1947 and attended St Stanislaus College. He graduated from the University of Toronto and later completed his doctorate at Leeds. McWatt, now retired, was Head of the English Department at the Cave Hill UWI Campus in Barbados. He has published three volumes of poems Interiors (1989), El Dorado (1994) which won the Guyana Prize for Poetry as did Journey to Le Repentir (2009). McWatt was the founding editor of the Journal of West Indian Literature. In his poems, there is sometimes an identifiable puckish humour to be found in biographical references, and he identifies very strongly with the hinterland of Guyana.
The recital was held on Wednesday.
