Winner of the Guyana Prize Caribbean Award 2011 (Poetry).
This is an immensely ambitious collection of poems, the fruit of more than a dozen years' work since the publication of Mark McWatt's Guyana prize-winning collection The Language of Eldorado in 1994 (his first collection Interiors won the Commonwealth Poetry prize in 1989). Strands of autobiography, a deeply sensuous ecology of place, historical narratives; the inner world of imagination and the often difficult realities of the postcolonial nation are interwoven in the collection's bold but carefully worked out architecture. The four parts of the book represent at one level linear phases of a life: childhood; adolescence and young manhood; maturity and the first intimations of ageing. Within each section there is an intersecting narrative sequence that sometimes complements, sometimes expands and sometimes run counter to the 'personal' narratives. In 'Mercator', poems in the voice of a nameless Elizabethan sea captain searching for Eldorado intertwine with semi-autobiographical poems about a boy's discovery of self and world in the remote northwest district of Guyana.