Maggie Harris was born in Guyana and now lives in Broadstairs, Kent. She has won the Guyana Prize for Literature, was regional winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2014, and won the Wales Poetry Award in 2020. She has worked as a creative writing tutor, reader development worker and International Teaching Fellow and has collaborated with artists across genres since 1990. In 2024 she was awarded a DYPC (Developing your creative potential, Arts Council England) grant towards revisiting Guyana and its rainforests, following the discovery of oil. I Sing to the Greenhearts is her eleventh book.

It is surely no coincidence that the greenhearts in the title of this volume also make their appearance in the poems that mark the beginning, middle and end of this book. These large timber trees of the laurel family which grow to a height of 40 metres (130 feet) in the rainforests of Guyana are at the heart and soul of the landscape and economy of Harris’s native land. Given that several of the poems in this collection touch on environmental issues, it can hardly escape our attention that the green heart emoji is often used, among other things, to express support for environmental causes.

Devastation caused by the destruction of the rainforest is evident in the opening poem: “No- one let our forest sing, the whine / of chainsaws cut out their harmonies ... No one let the forest sing      they were too busy stripping / her flesh and bones     crunching into dust / undiscovered potions and vaccines.       No-one sing to me / of forests, no one taught me to love them …”

Our wanton destruction of the natural world comes to the fore again in ‘100 Olive Trees’:

 

     They burnt the olive trees down

     to the ground; aged trees that fed

     and succoured generations, bowed their branches

     to offer fruit, oil, shade …

 

Later in the same poem, Harris writes:

 

     Who realises the bitter irony of proverbs –

     one does not bite the hand that feeds you

     or the image of the olive branch as a symbol of peace?

 

Topography and economics make their reappearance in ‘OIL and WATER’ where Harris reminds us that the future of Guyana, which is known as the land of many waters, is now to some extent in the hands of several multinational oil companies who are exploring oil fields off its coasts. While it may be rich in oil, there is a cruel irony in the fact that based on GDP per capita, Guyana remains one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere: “now oil and gas both pumping / and the rich stay rich but the poor stay poorer / what will happen in Guyana?” Anticipating one kind of environmental disaster, Harris warns us repeatedly of the fact that “oil and water don’t mix.”

Her poems on plants: ‘Clematis, early flowering,’ ‘Sweet pea,’ ‘My Fuschia Likes Reggae,’ and ‘Mister Arum’ are among some of her finest. Here is the opening stanza of the poem about the clematis:

 

     Miss Show-her-face has shown her face at last.

     Two years now we’ve had the in-out out-in dance

      in a pot, in the ground, in the shade, in the sun.

     The pampering went on for a long time.

     I baby her because that’s what you do

     with something delicate and young. You mother.

 

Not all of these poems are set in Guyana even though the resilience of the greenheart remains a powerful symbol which thrives when transplanted into a British garden. During lockdown, parrots cause pandemonium in a UK suburb. Elsewhere, a lynx escapes from Ceredigion zoo to eventually gain its freedom. A couple of poems address Western art: Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s painting ‘The Daydream’ and Joanna Mary Boyce’s ‘Head of a Mulatto Woman.’ In many of the poems we are close to the sea whether it be in Wales or Margate or off the coasts of Guyana. Several poems drift in and out of the Creole language which adds another layer of depth and authenticity to the text. Here, the ghosts of the past are brought to life in lyrical creative imagery.

Taking words from ‘Rules of Engagement with a Chocolate Cosmos,’ these poems lure you in "‘like a fisherman’s / hook dragging you into the eye of a zinnia / delightfully / described as Reggae Orange." All in all, this is a very fine collection, one that I will be returning to time and time over.

 

Maggie Harris, I Sing to the Greenhearts, Seren, £10.99