BOTM 005 | Horizons
Cover painting by Stanley Greaves
Title: Horizons: Selected Poems 1969-1998
Published: Great Britain 2002 by Peepal Tree Press Ltd
Author: Stanley Greaves
Editor: N/A
Description: “Stanley Greaves brings a painter’s perceptions and musician’s ear to the writing of this substantial selection of his poetry written over the past forty years. He describes his painting as ‘a kind of allegorical story-telling’ and the same kind of connections between the concrete and the metaphysical, of the extraordinary in the ordinary are found in his poems. Greaves guess at a background that includes African, Amerindian legend and Hindu philosophy. Nor does he reject Europe, and in his poetry and his painting explores connections between European Surrealism and the intuitive elements within Guyana’s heterogeneous culture.”
(Horizons, Back Cover)
Horizons and the Guyanese Polymath Stanley Greaves
Overall
Stanley Greaves Horizons is a collection of selected poems from 1969-1998. “Stanley Greaves was born in Guyana. He studied Art in the UK and was head of the Division of Creative Arts at the University of Guyana for several years. He left Guyana in the 1980s and has been resident in Barbados since that time. He is one of the Caribbean’s most distinguished artists with major exhibitions in the UK (The Elders, with Brother Everald Brown) and Europe as well as throughout the Caribbean. In addition to his poetry and painting, he is also an accomplished classical guitarist.” (Horizons, Back Cover)
“He has won many honors for his painting, most notably perhaps the Gold medal at the 1994 Santo Domingo Biennale of Painting. But as the distinguished Bill Carr observed in an unpublished essay on Greaves’ poetry written in 1987, Stanley Greaves ‘is a polymathic artist - painter, sculptor, potter, and musician - on classical guitar.’ Carr - who taught for many years at the University of Guyana, where he was a colleague of Greaves - went on to say, ‘ I have known for a long time that he wrote poetry. Individual poems - but that’s like an architect walking about with bricks in his pocket while he meditates the finished house.’ That ‘unfinished house’ is the present collection, selected and constructed by Greaves from the individual poems he has written over a thirty year period.” (Horizons, 137)
For those who have been following the archive for some time might find poem 132 “DREAM OF DEMERARA” familiar as portions have been used before on the archive. This poem additionally so eloquently sets up one of goals Little Guyana Archive is trying to achieve: record ‘Our assumed history’ and make it an accessible digital wind that does leave a mark.
Drawing and Poetry
Drawing by Stanley Greaves (Horizons, 112)
132# DREAM OF DEMERARA
In my land,
no known ghosts walk.
Our assumed history is but a strange wind
that leaves no mark
upon an indifferent sea.
Even monsters dwell elsewhere
in another safe place,
where victims know themselves.
1981.
(Horizons, 119)
If we treat Greaves ‘land’ as Guyana we can begin to feel the mystery that surrounds Guyanese history. Not that no history is known but that many people’s family history stops abruptly at the slave trade, a period that Greaves may think created these ‘fissured creatures.’ The words ‘assumed history’ further this point by reminding us that history is this quality that is inherently assumed. Everyone has a mother and a father, but when some go back in search of their full family tree they are left with nothing mere than finding their ancestors recorded as numbers of quantities on slave ships with no way to know where they came from. Because of this it is even more pertinent we make an extra effort today to record and preserve Guyanese culture and history for the generations of Guyanese to come in hopes that in time Guyanese are born with a more robust history to immerse themselves in.
Table of Contents:
THE CARTER POEMS
KIN
MEDITATIONS
METAPHYSICS
PEBBLES
HEARTLAND
MORTALITY
HARD YEARS
LAND OF GREEN
POT O’RICE
AFTERWARD
Stewart Brown
