Ian on Sunday

The Samurai’s Songs

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.

The pursuit of beauty

Sometimes I travel up the Essequibo River to spend weekends in a house set on the bank in a clearing of white sand cut from the jungle. 

Mind-Travelling

Nowadays I really only travel in the mind. Many blessings – no security checks; no immigration or customs hassle, instantaneous arrival at fascinating destinations.

Vital aspects of life

Consider these aspects: ●             The bedrock of marriage – You can generally recognize a good marriage, but it is hard to tie down the details. 

How champions burn out

The saddest sight in sport is to observe a marvelous athlete not so much go into decline as suddenly burn-out before one’s eyes.

It is all a dream

I had a vivid dream of my father. When they come in dreams my mother and my father seem very real and I reach out to them.

Inconsolable loss

At eighty eight years of age one must expect to factor attendance at funerals into one’s monthly (weekly?)

The delights of reading

Joseph Brodsky, the great Russian poet who died at the sadly young age of 56, on receiving his Nobel Prize in the Grand Hall of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm in December, 1987, declared a great truth: “There is no doubt in my mind that, should we have been choosing our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programmes, there would be much less grief on earth.”

A time of love and blessings

Tradition gathers around Christmas. Pageants and homecomings and longed-for preparations repeat themselves year after year into beloved lifetime rituals.

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