Ian McDonald

I was speaking not long ago to an old, dear friend, the Canadian Philip O’Meara.

  So many Christmas poems from which to choose. E U Fanthrope’s lines:   And this was the moment When a few farm workers and three Members of an obscure Persian sect

In a long life I have become accustomed to the usefulness of reading.

So much begins with parents. So much continues in the training grounds.

So much begins with parents. Their daily, persevering, unending love and interest and example teach lessons which reach deep into us; we are nurtured and our minds and souls are formed into shapes and disciplines that last all our lives.

The title I gave to one of my collections of poems is ‘Between Silence and Silence.’

The great unabridged Oxford English Dictionary contains half a million words.

In my home, a step down off the dining room, overlooking the beautiful garden my wife has created, I have my studiolo.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 Al Qaeda attack I remember writing that America should take care not to over-react to that singular act of terror.

Some of the best poetry has been written by people on the verge of death.

I consider myself reasonably well read and passably well-informed. I try to keep up with what is going on.

If you do not read poetry you miss much. You miss star showers around your head and arrows near your heart.

The world is suffering from giganticism. Bigger is considered better and biggest best.

Even in the worst of times – and who can doubt that the daily, brutal, unstoppable exploits of uncaught criminals have made this time one of widening and deepening fear and frustration – reading comes to the rescue by revealing other worlds of experience where cruelty and mindlessness and man’s inhumanity to man do not continually have the upper hand.

I have been writing about Shivnarine Chanderpaul for more than twenty years, even before he played Test cricket.

I have far exceeded the Biblical span of three score years and ten, so I realize clearly that this overtime gifted by the Gods must be most carefully husbanded.

Perhaps there has never been any time in history when terror, horror, cruelty and brutal suffering, much of it inflicted by men themselves, have set their curse upon so many lands.

The father of policing in Britain, and therefore of policing in Britain’s colonies, was Sir Robert Peel.

History often saddles people with reputations that are undeserved. Take Florence Nightingale.

One might have thought that as time passes the heart might harden as arteries harden and the sense of loss grow less acute as the five familiar senses most certainly tend to do.