Shortlisted for the Guyana Prize for Literature 2011.

These poems written over the past thirty years, but most of them recently, have as their focal point an act of homage to the great Guyanese poet Martin Carter, voice of a nation. They celebrate a friendship and an example of vision and integrity, and bear witness to Carter’s role as the nation’s conscience in Guyana’s continuing agony of disputed elections and ethnic divisions.

Dense and jewelled, the poems also investigate the numinous power of words and the necessity and sanctity of the act of making. With half a dozen striking line drawings, these poems create a surreal twist on the everyday and reveal a profound artist’s ecological vision of the relationship between the senses and the correspondences between man and the natural world. The poems are quirky, philosophically enquiring but have the concreteness of thought rising like ‘pond-bottom bubbles’.

Stanley Greaves was born in Guyana. He is one of the Caribbean’s most distinguished artists and an accomplished classical guitarist. He currently lives in Barbados.