Ian McDonald, Not Quite Without a Moon, Peepal Tree Press, 2023, £ 9.99, 90 pages, ISBN:978-1-84523-558-1.
Doumerc Eric
University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès
Mots-clés: poésie des Caraïbes, Guyana, Trinidad.
Keywords: Caribbean poetry, Guyana, Trinidad.
Ian McDonald is a poet and writer who was born in Trinidad in 1933, but spent most of his adult life in Guyana after reading history at Cambridge University. In Guyana he worked for Bookers and then for the Guyana Sugar Industry. His novel entitled The Hummingbird Tree (1969) is considered as a Caribbean modern classic and was adapted for television by the BBC in 1992. He is also well-known as a columnist for the Stabroek News.
His latest collection of poems is entitled Not Quite Without A Moon and was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2023. The book is divided into four sections which are more or less chronological and follow the poet’s development from early chilldhood to old age.
The first section is mainly about the poet’s childhood in Trinidad and Antigua and takes us into a bygone era when the West Indies were still British colonies and the colonial elites sent their offspring to England for their education, as in the poem entitled “Tea With Uncle Arthur”. The poems in that section are full of nostalgia and have the poet reminisce about holidays in Antigua and the mango-picking ritual at the poet’s St Augustine home in Trinidad. The poem entitled “Ripe Mangoes” is about an old caretaker picking up mangoes and having to fight a cohort of monkeys to save his mangoes. In the child’s vision, the old careaker becomes a “bearded warrior” battling against intruders:
“The bearded warrior must have been through this before;
strong arm aimed with accuracy, he pelted back,
chased a few who came down on the sand”.(13)
Death is already present in the poems about the poet’s childhood as in the poem entitled “Beheading A Chicken”, about a “village boy” the poet knew well, or thought he knew well until he saw him behead a chicken:
“Blood gushed on the tree stump,
black eyes would not close.
I knew there was suffering.
Casual, he didn’t think about it” (19)
The second section is mainly about the poet’s life in Guyana where he worked for many years for the Guyana Sugar Industry, although there is one poem set in Trinidad (“Willy Kong Ting”). These poems exude a loving tenderness towards the folk, the common people the poet rubbed shoulders with. So the reader gets to meet and overhear the conversation of sugar workers discussing how they are going to spend their bonus (“End of Crop Bonus”):
“Children’s schoolbooks, clothes, shoes, a new bicycle.
One said he would get his wife glasses.
I was ashamed to be taught such a simple lesson”(37)
As often in this collection, there is indeed a lesson to be learnt at the end of the poem, a kind of moral that the poet/persona wishes to extract from his experience.
The presence and influence of Derek Walcott looms large in many poems, particularly in the piece entitled “Mrs Matthews”, which is about an old lady who used to read the poets’s column in The Stabroek News and wrote letters to him expressing her gratitude and admiration for him. The poet finally managed to meet her just before she died and that experience affected him deeply. His tribute to her quotes Walcott’s “The Season of Phantasmal Peace”:
“I spoke about the letters, how much they meant to me,
quote Walcott’s “Season…”, wished her eternal peace” (47)
As in Walcott’s “A Letter From Brooklyn”, the poet experiences some kind of epiphany or revelation when he realises that a deep bond has been forged with an old lady who has been reading his poems/letters all her life.
Like the poet and critic Stewart Brown with whom he edited an anthology of West Indian cricket writing (The Bowling Was Superfine: West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket, Peepal Tree Press, 2012), Ian McDonald has written extensively about cricket, and the present collection includes two fine poems about that quintessential English game which was imported into the West Indies. “Sixty Years At Bourda” celebrates Georgetown’s eponymous cricket stadium and the powerful bond cricket can forge between vastly different populations. The poem entitled “The Throw” is a tribute to the late Guyanese cricketer Joseph Solomon and is written in the cricketer’s own Creole-inflected voice :
“Tension in the gut like knife, skipper say stay calm.
Wes bowl, Kline play, my fellow fielder dash –
young Peter in a rush to run Ian Meckiff out.
All to play for – good Test becoming great.” (45)
McDonald’s experimentations with voice work well in most of the poems which are often characterised by a certain terseness and an economy of language. In many poems he conciseness of the style brings out a strong emotional charge, as in the poem entitled “Exile”, in the fourth section, about an old Indo-Guyanese neighbour, Ganesh, whose children sent tickets for him to migrate to the USA. Ganesh brings the poet and his wife “a big basket of purple sweet potatoes” (81) for the last time and when they looked at each other, the two men had tears in their eyes.
The last two sections are mainly about the passing of time and the coming of old age, but they deal with these themes in a wry and humorous manner, as in the poems entitled “My Belly Grows On Me” and “Joint Pains”. One of the most engaging pieces in that final section is the poem entitled “Man With Cutlass”, which, starting from a seemingly anecdoctal occurrence, in that case, a young man stopping at the poet’s gate to ask for a glass of water, reveals a greater truth. The persona in the poem is somewhat alarmed by the young man’s “wild-looking dreadlocks” (82) and by his dishevelled look and thick beard, but soon comes to realise that the young man means no harm and just stopped by to get some water. The conclusion of the poem speaks volumes about the nature of race relations in a post-colonial society : “Oh God, wish I could be a better person” (82). The humanity and generosity of McDonald’s poetry come out in these lines and in fact illuminate the whole collection.
All in all, Not Quite Without A Moon confirms Ian Mc Donald’s status as an important, if understated, voice in Caribbean poetry.