Ian McDonald, who wrote only one novel, but it is still considered a classic of Caribbean literature, died July 24. He was 93. The Guardian reported that The Humming-Bird Tree (1969), set in Trinidad in the late 1940s, "is a gently heartbreaking tale about racial boundaries, and a haunting evocation of postwar Trinidad in all its beauty and ugliness, emerging into a new era with the prospect of independence on the horizon."
McDonald, who was more a poet than a fiction writer, was featured in numerous anthologies and published eight poetry collections, including Mercy Ward (1998), Between Silence and Silence (2003), and The Comfort of All Things (2012). He also edited or co-edited publications like the Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry in English (1992) and two anthologies of West Indian writing: They Came in Ships (1998) and This Bowling Was Superfine (2009).
In both prose and poetry, "he displayed an ability to celebrate the sensuous joy of Caribbean life in all its complexity, acknowledging the wonder of its dazzling natural world and colorful human relations without skirting over the darker, more brutal side of both," the Guardian noted.
Jamaican poet Ann-Margaret Lim described McDonald's poetry as "irradiated by his celebration of life, his gratitude for happy days and for earth's bounty of joy."
Born in St. Augustine, Trinidad, McDonald returned to the Caribbean after leaving Cambridge in 1955 to take up an administrative post in British Guiana (now Guyana) with the Booker group, the owner of huge sugar estates that "was becoming more enlightened and was trying to make itself into a business with an unusual commitment to looking after its workers," the Guardian wrote. In the 1960s, McDonald began immersing himself in Guyana's culture, eventually coming to consider himself "Trinidadian by birth, Guyanese by adoption."
In addition to poems, he wrote short stories and a one-act play, The Tramping Man. In 1969, The Humming-Bird Tree won the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje prize (then the Winifred Holtby memorial prize). It was adapted into a film in 1992, starring Sunil Y Ramjitsingh as Kaiser, Tom Beasley as Alan Holmes, and Desha Penco as Jaillin.
The novel's success spurred interest in McDonald's poetry, His first collection appeared in Guyana, and collections of his work followed at regular intervals, including Essequibo (poems about wayfarers he met in the hinterland of the Essequibo river) in 1992 and Jaffo the Calypsonian (1994).
New and Collected Poems (2018) featured poems written in his 80s, including the opening poem to Mercy Ward, in which he had reflected that death comes "sudden/ quick as light/ skin shine/ then bone white."