When Mahadai Das died at the tragically early age of 49, there was an outpouring of grief across the Caribbean world that a poet who never quite had the chance to build a literary career to match her talents had been lost. She had for some time been recognised as an outstanding Guyanese poet, but when Peepal Tree published ‘Bones’ in 1988, there was widespread critical recognition that here was an outstandingly original new voice. Then severe illness struck and though there followed occasional poems that developed the achievement of ‘Bones’, there was no new collection. Despite this, interest in her work has continued to grow, with regular requests to Peepal Tree for access to her earlier work. This ‘Selected Poems’, discussed with Mahadai Das before her death, now organised in co-operation with the poet’s sister, brings together all the poems we feel Mahadai Das would have wished to see republished. It draws from the poet’s first book, ‘I want to be a Poetess of my People’, published in Guyana in 1977, including such fine poems as ‘They Came in Ships’, poems that explore her Indo-Guyanese background and the best of the poems of nationalist fervour, those in particular that have sensuous attachment to land and landscape. There are others that Mahadai did not wish to see republished, poems that in hindsight were betrayed by a naive faith in the then ruling party. Selected Poems includes the whole of ‘My Finer Steel Will Grow’, published as a chapbook in the USA in 1982, poems of bitter disillusion with the turn of post-independence politics in Guyana, and poems that begin the exploration of some of the contradictions between her sense of Indianness and her identity as a woman. The selection includes the whole of ‘Bones’ and a number of poems written in the period when Mahadai Das was living in the USA. These poems explore more personal themes and in particular write with dazzling bravura on the themes of illness and death. In addition, ‘Selected Poems’ brings together many of the fine poems published in journals and those previously uncollected, from lively, humorous nation language poems to the oblique, highly original poems written in the years after ‘Bones’.
