Tag Archives: Trinidad/Caribbean Island

“The Orbis Spike, 1610” – Poem by Trinidadian Poet Jennifer Rahim

19 Sunday Nov 2023

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Trinidadian Poet Jennifer Rahim (1963-2023)
Photo Credit: Peepal Tree Press Ltd.

My Poetry Corner November 2023 features the poem “The Orbis Spike, 1610” by Jennifer Rahim from her poetry collection Sanctuaries of Invention (UK, 2021). Born in the Caribbean Island of Trinidad in 1963, Jennifer Rahim was an award-winning poet, fiction writer, and literary critic. She held a BA (1987) and PhD (1993) in English Literature, and an MA in Theology (2016). After joining the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine in 1997 as a lecturer in the Department of Liberal Arts, she went on to teach a range of courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, including creative writing, literary criticism, and feminist theory. She died unexpectedly in March 2023, leaving behind a substantial body of published work.

Most of the poems in Rahim’s collection were written during the Covid-19 lockdown and a state of emergency in Trinidad. Her poems address the nature of time, place, and mass death. In “Gone Viral,” she notes in the opening lines (p. 18):

Some words return to haunt us at the root.
The world reels from an underrated flu – gone viral,
as when a presidential gaffe becomes a kind of math.
Exponential: Many people will die who have never died before.

She recalls, too, in the opening verse of “Survival” (p. 19):

Any number of days is one too many
when home is no safe haven against the death
that roams neighborhood streets,
coughs on a public bus,
reaches for toothpaste on a grocery shelf,
jogs by in less friendly parks. . .
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“Betty” – Poem by Caribbean Poet Ian McDonald

20 Sunday Aug 2023

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Caribbean (Trinidad/Guyana) Poet Ian McDonald
Photo Credit: Peepal Tree Press Ltd.

My Poetry Corner August 2023 features the poem “Betty” by Ian McDonald from his poetry collection New and Collected Poems 1957-2017 (UK, 2018). Born in the Caribbean Island of Trinidad in 1933, Ian McDonald is a poet, novelist, dramatist, and non-fiction writer. After moving to then British Guiana in 1955, he made his home there until his eighties when he migrated to Canada to be close to his children and grandchildren.

Born into a white family of power and privilege, the young Ian fell in love with literature and writing as a schoolboy. In 1955, after graduating from Cambridge University in England with a Bachelor of Arts Honors Degree in History, he began working with Bookers Ltd., then owners of the British Guiana sugar estates/plantations, where he rose to the position of Director of Marketing & Administration. When the company was nationalized in 1976, McDonald remained as the Administrative Director of the newly formed Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) until his retirement in 1999. Following his retirement, he spent the next eight years (2000-2007) as the CEO of the Sugar Association of the Caribbean, located in Georgetown, Guyana.

McDonald’s contributions to the development and promotion of Guyanese and Caribbean literature, theater, and sports are impressive and memorable. How did he ever find time to write poetry? In an article “A Love of Poetry” for the Guyana Chronicle in September 2014, he said of his writing process: “Occasionally a poem emerges in the consciousness fully formed and can be dislodged from there onto paper with a shake of the pen. Mostly what occurs is a sense of something needing to be said, a couple of lines in the head, perhaps just a phrase, and the accumulation of a poem begins and goes on with many fits and starts and adjustments, abandonments and reformulations….”

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“A Simple Man” – Poem by Caribbean Poet Ian McDonald

13 Sunday Oct 2019

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Front Cover: People of Guyana by Ian McDonald and Peter Jailall
Photo Credit: MiddleRoad Publishers/Canada

 

My Poetry Corner October 2019 features the poem “A Simple Man” by Ian McDonald from the joint poetry collection, People of Guyana, by Ian McDonald and Peter Jailall. Born in the Caribbean island of Trinidad in 1933, Ian McDonald is a poet, novelist, dramatist, and non-fiction writer. After moving to then British Guiana in 1955, he made his home there. Today, he lives partly in his adopted homeland and partly in Canada.

Born into a white family of power and privilege, the young Ian fell in love with literature and writing as a schoolboy. In 1955, after graduating from Cambridge University in England with a Bachelor’s Honors Degree in History, he began working with Bookers Ltd., then owners of the British Guiana sugar estates. When the company was nationalized in 1976, McDonald remained as the Administrative Director of the newly formed Guyana Sugar Corporation until his retirement in 1999.

On one of those days while working with Guyana’s sugar estates, McDonald visited Betty, a former sugarcane laborer, “an old woman in a run-down logie room,” to get details for her resettlement. In his heart-wrenching poem, “Betty,” the poet captures her long life of deprivation, forgotten by society.

she said her life was nothing to her
she said all women’s lives were as nothing
no one had been pleased when she was born
she was sure of that boys were princes 

Once married, she had been abandoned by her husband for another woman, eventually ending up “with old women in this place.” Betty didn’t want to move. They were the only people she knew. Continue reading →