Search results for ""Author Stanley Greaves""

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.

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Stanley Greaves brings a painter's perceptions and a 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, and the presence of the extraordinary in the ordinary are found in his poems.Greaves guesses at a background that includes African, Amerindian and European ancestry, but declines to relate to any of these in an exclusive way. Rather he writes out of a creole sensibility that celebrates Guyanese diversity: Afro-Guyanese folkways, 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.To enter the collection is to discover a whole, self-created world of Blakean richness, one which is never static, but growing to encompass new elements. Greaves's is a dialectical vision, alert both to the movements of history and the minutiae of daily change.His themes include family, daily life, metaphysical speculation, the hard years of social collapse and political repression in Guyana, the strange visitations of inner imaginative life and his comradeship with the great Guyanese poet Martin Carter. His is a sensibility 'welcoming as the earth is/ for every floating seed/ on stairs of air and rain'.This collection won the 2002 Guyana Prize for the best first collection of poetry.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.

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Head in the air, feet on the ground, gardens, household objects, frogs, dogs, birds, kites and a host of other flora, fauna, rocks and stones find their place in the fertile mind of a poet, painter, sculptor and musician who has lived long enough to accumulate wisdom.Sometimes the messages offer perceptions that have never been seen so clearly before, sometimes they hint at the elusive just out of reach or sight. Always, though “possibilities beckon”, and the little poems, haiku of an individual, invented kind, frequently offer metaphysical graspings both in the philosophical sense and in the way the metaphysical poets yoked the seemingly disparate into perfect sense. There is an acute awareness of plays of light and shade, textures, the touchable and the surrounding world of sound. As in Greaves’ paintings, shifts in perspective and proportion offer upheavals of the habitual view. The gaze looks inward as much as out – at the processes of thought, memory and imagination. The pleasures are both singular and collective: in the polished economy of phrase, form and the moments of surprise, and in the accumulating sense of entering a world that it is a privilege to share. Not least of the pleasures are the eight pieces of original artwork: ink, brush and pen drawings and collages that offer an alternative vision to the poems.

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