Ian on Sunday

When I worked in the sugar industry I remember once discussing a problem with a young and junior colleague.

The title I gave to my last collection of poems was Between Silence and Silence. 

Death is among the most ordinary of experiences. After all everyone dies.

They have become an inspiring part of Guyana’s poetic heritage.  I found them instantly unforgettable.

As I get older I find I try to capture in memory more fully than ever the passing marvellousness of an ordinary day by writing down what happens in a journal.

Two impulses contend in me – one is to allow chaos to take hold and the other is to keep everything tidy and in good order.

Theodor Fontane is the German writer best known as the author of novels which are considered “the most completely achieved of any writer between Goethe and Thomas Mann.” 

for what else is there but books, books and the sea, verandahs and the pages of the sea to write of the wind and the memory of wind whipped hair in the sun, the colour of fire.

One of the most remarkable men of the 20th century undoubtedly was King Sobhuza the Second, Lion of Swaziland. 

It has been a pleasant diversion to think back over the years and give brief accounts of outstanding people whose paths in life I have crossed, if only peripherally.

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.

Hardly a month or even a week went by in my working life without one or other or both of these men appearing in the world’s headlines.

Sparks from the central fire – I was lucky to be near enough to feel the blaze these men ignited in the world ●     Derek Walcott, or rather his poetry, entered my life when he was twenty and I was seventeen.

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

Such men as these walk onto a field of play, or enter a room, and their life-force brings everyone to silence and attention – these were two men who in their very different ways set my mind alight.

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

I thank whatever Gods that be that even at the age of 78 my mind remains restless and eager to absorb new facts, new theories, new ways of looking at life and the world, new stories of mankind’s continual search for perfected knowledge, new illuminations of the spirit.

Anyone who has played sport at the highest level knows that sinking nervous, almost fearful feeling before a big event.

Not long ago I wrote a column throwing freezing water on the usefulness of election manifestos or indeed any master plan.

Every nation in the world obsessively continues to measure success by the state of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP).