Acts of Kindness
Family visit, cousins from the old days,
not been back for forty years, refugees
from bad days not in the shops,
fear of always being below, no future for the children,
them with gifts, bring back memories,
then it was naked food that my wife didn’t have;
now it was a wonderfully embroidered tablecloth
and, to me, bottles of Niagara wine. they were
lovely.
We gave them a good time, laughs and memories.
When they left, my wife was grieving, Not Enough.
The next morning I found her in the garden
Prepare a large basket of lettuce, fruit, herbs,
batches of flowers to send where they were staying
in Industry, where they had lived so long ago,
where my wife suffered her sad memories.
I feel better, says my wife. Kindness filled their lives.
– Ian McDonald
[Ian McDonald, Poems For Mary, Canada, MiddleRoad Publishers, 2020. 73pp]
So far Ian McDonald, poet, novelist, playwright, editor, anthology, company director, sportswriter, tennis player and cricket analyst, has revealed in a full and extraordinary life. His achievements have extended to a worthy contribution to Guyanese and West Indian life. He has come from a privileged background and existence through the most prestigious education, and is able to trace a fairly noble lineage of ancestors.
As a writer, he has been extremely prolific in recent years, with only two new publications in 2020: Legacy: A West Indian Family Story (Paria Publishing Company Ltd, 2020) – documentation of the lives of many of those distinguished and colorful ancestors; a Poems to Mary (Canada, MiddleRoad Publishers, 2020) – a collection of poems for his wife, Mary McDonald.
While for the ancestors he provides a biography with fine detail, for Mary, it is quite different. She was inspired by many poems – McDonald explains, “I have written poems for her, with her in mind and situations where her presence was deeply felt” and “I have collected such poems in this book”.
About celebrities, WH Auden states that “a shilling life will give you all the facts”, but Poems to Mary it’s not a shilling life. It does not list celebrity details or factual documentation. It gives a full picture of its subject, but not what you find in any magazine or biographical leaflet bought for a shilling. Unlike Inheritance, biographical information is scarce; there is little documentation of Mary’s life before marriage, her family or her background, outside of vague references in a few poems. In “Acts of Kindness” we can state that she lives in Industry. A few others bait the curious with possible implications. But McDonald gives a thorough portrayal of his wife in this collection of verse. Among other things she focuses on it with images of love and family, unity and devotion. She seems inseparable from those qualities.
As a poet, McDonald has many themes and interests. These include autobiography, life experiences, love, literature, Essequibo rainforests, river and interior landscape, birds, family life, the poet’s sons, and his wife’s home garden. But his work is overwhelmed by the subject of poetry. While writing about poetry fits easily with writing about Mary, the poems are also overwhelmed by McDonald’s obsession with mortality, aging and volatility, which continually overrides the love poems. While there is concern throughout his work for the energy, the powerful energy of living, there is always a constant reminder of the timeliness of life and its approaching end. However, consistent with the ongoing love story, is the statement that one of the things that has sustained her through this is Mary.
McDonald had this to say: “A lively young woman came late to my pointless world. It’s been a big part of my life for a long time. How does one convey in life what clearly means everything? What would be red without the red? Length and breadth without depth? We say to each other as children “I will love you forever”.
Mary is the poet’s favorite, responsible for so many of his poems. The collection is a love story with frequent expressions of marriage and interrelationship across the many poems. But there is more value, a broader interest to the reader in a number of deep, gripping poems that stretch the imagination in their conflicts with other issues beyond romance and a fulfilling marriage life.
Poetry itself is a major study among the selections as McDonald dedicates himself to his insatiable love of art and to reading; but goes beyond descriptions of reading into poetry as a philosophy or concept that cannot be defined as in “Poetry” or “River Dancer”. References to poverty and struggle as in “The Matchbox”, “Wild Horses” and “The Starching Iron”, are often juxtaposed against the very privileged life of the poet / persona, a comfortable existence and an overflowing bounty, and made richer by the flawless relationship thus introduced. with Mary. He is even mentioned in “River Dancer” in vague connection with his mix and love. This deepens the poems and makes “The Matchbox” the most poignant in the book. It is a profound reminder of a treasured gift of a matchbox in contrast to the poet’s / persona’s home overflowing with wealth taken for granted. Outside, the little girl’s one hand is touching “the cold and bitter glass”, while in the other she is grabbing her poverty gift from a matchbox “held tightly against her, / after ‘ to keep up with every fading Christmas in the past ”.
“Acts of Kindness” contains a more open revelation of Mary’s family and life before marriage than any of the others, and becomes stronger for its subtlety and unobtrusive in its references to Guyana’s form of nationalized poverty in the 1970s and ‘ r the 1980s, and the economic and political. push factors that drove so many Guyanese away to foreign lands. Similarly, “Poetry” is a selection of exceptional quality in its complex variety. He questions literature and the imagination while remaining a love poem that dramatizes his tender care for Mary. The poem is consolidated in its inter-textual references to other poets and their work. It broadens the imagination as he recreates Homer, the grandfather of them all, where Mary knitted a jumper becomes a recreation of the patient Penelope knitting and undoing her as an expression of her love.
Then there’s the old-fashioned, old-styled butter churn that recalls McDonald as a boy in the safety of his home in St. Augustine, along with his reference to household servants. That poem “The Sound of Making Butter”, which along with the others mentioned above, is among the most memorable in the book.
Poems to Mary contains several modern poems, capitalized experiments, no punctuation marks, especially in the “Garden Poems” section where every tree, love-cultivated plant expresses itself in a short modern reminiscent verse of Mervyn Morris.
Morris also happens to be a long-standing friend of McDonald’s and a fellow tennis player of the Davis Cup and Brandon Cup days. This technique, a new and unusual adventure for McDonald, gives the poems an impression of an unobstructed line of expression and continuous experience with punctuation – an emancipation of powerful feeling – without number.
These give eternal life and fortune to the poems even as they seek to create fame and immortality for Mrs Mary McDonald.