Ian on Sunday

I have always been impressed by the advice the great French philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal, gave a gambling friend of his who was inclined to doubt the existence of God.

Reading prevents your life ever narrowing down to the humdrum, the routine or the boring.

It seems not a day, and certainly not a week,

I hear the frequent chorus: “Poetry is boring,” “poetry is impossible to understand,” “poetry is irrelevant,” “poetry has no place in this computer age,” “poetry is for academics.” 

The world is terror-stricken. A condition of advanced paranoia is spreading everywhere.

If I was younger, and the fierce fire burned in me, surely I would be among the protestors against the new order of things. 

Giacomo Leopardi, who was to become one of the greatest poets of his time, was born in 1798 on his parents’ estate near the small Italian town of Recanati in the dusty hills above the Adriatic sea.

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.