I deemed it a most singular honor when my editor solicited my opinion in a review of Balwant Bhagwandin’s first book of poetry Wild Flowers. I had the distinct pleasure of reading some of his poems before the poet returned to Guyana, which he so eloquently averred to in “Journey’s End”.

We used to occasionally sip beer, looked at the tapes of great poets and writers and feast on bhunjal. He lived alone then in a tiny apartment, and needs no stretch of the imagination to empathize with the intense emotions that he gave vent to as he pounded out on his computer stanzas like those of, “a new york cockroach”.

I constantly encouraged him to seek publication, since from the onset I considered his work top shelf material. However, his extreme modesty, to my mind, was eroding his confidence in such a big venture as an anthology. He had previously been published in the prestigious American Anthology of Verse, so I could not fathom his reticence and reluctance. When he rang me that his book was out, I was caught between euphoria and surprise. All I could stammer was, “Congrats Bro,” and then made some small talk.

Every one of the poems in Wild Flowers is a work of enduring excellence. From the pragmatic humor of “The Limerick for Patrick,” to the empirical praxis of “Alien Resident,” every poem is filled with the stuff that great poetry is composed of. Each one merits reading and re-reading, if not for the subtle quality of its imagery, then for the veiled reflection on the characters and things which may seem to the hoi polloi to be ordinary.

Reading Wild Flowers for the first time, the reader is transported through myriads of emotions – from the refrain of recurring nostalgia through regret and the mundane, to the lament of loneliness and the lack of friendship.

No section of society is sacrosanct under the poet’s pen. From racism and color prejudice in “With Criminal Intent”, “Gallows”, and others, to politics in “Death of a Nation” and “New Age Revolutionaries” Balwant’s pen has touched every facet.

From the inner city in “Oh Mother of the Ghetto” to the tenderness of the love of a sister in “My Sister”, and the lament for his brother in poems like “Alien Resident”, to the inaccuracies of research and findings and their concomitant short comings, such are given adequate coverage in “Research” and “Time Story.” However, to try to enumerate all the various subjects that are covered, will be an exercise in futility, and serve no useful or practical purpose. It must be noted however that themes run so smoothly and subtly into one another as to defy many an attempt to categorize.

What can be recognized from Wild Flowers is that Balwant’s writings have been greatly influenced by his being catapulted, like so many others, into this second diaspora. Everyone in these circumstances cannot help but empathize with the deep emotions and profundity of his writings. This more than anything else reinforces the fine imagery and lends credence to the deep emotions that are aroused and titillated as the stanzas are read.

With flawless ambiance Wild Flowers switches you from the squalor of the inner city and its lure to the alienation and greed of those who lack true grit. The poet bemoans the taking of the path of least resistance in “Fleas” when he states, “Abandoning achievements and creations … we take up new domiciles … in the world’s every corner … to do a make over.” But in the same poem he bemoans that, “… symbiosis does not wholly slake the yearning … leaving us half feathered, nostalgia the nest we never depart.”

In Wild Flowers, Balwant deals with reality from different levels. From the pragmatism of poems like “A Winter’s Day Work Blues”, “Warning”, “Tell Me” and “Crime America Inc” he takes a bash of the social construct which breeds that type of poverty when it is stated “… for the many, a handout, a deal or a hustle is often the only lifeline … to go with distinction.” His humorous poem: “Limerick for Patrick” tells in the most direct way, the way of life and the end of an epicure or a drunkard, (however you categorize Patrick). Poems like these are rare in this collection, but the style is not beyond the poet. He prefers the profound and somber much more than the light hearted and comic.

Balwant’s character, honed by the vicissitudes of loneliness and time and the forced separation from those he loved most, penetrate his writings often, especially when he laments the lack of friends “where are the people I know? where is a single friend?” It is then that he gives vent to his intense feelings of anguish like “… loneliness is the scourge of the single … the silence that stupefies the single with its infinity.” He even bemoaned not having a certain friend “ … lack of cultivating the friendship.”

Wild Flowers succinctly chronicles the Immigrants’ hopes and aspirations, their failures and successes, from the lowliest ones to a successful unfulfilled contemporary in “Immigrant VIII”. All the Immigrant poems bear testimony to these facts.
Violence, wars and the horrors of war, the lamentation of imperfect political systems and their leaders are all immortalized in poems like “By Order Of”, “Like a Larva Inside a Guava”, “Democracy in Action”, “Sarajevo” and many more. Balwant rages against the perpetuation of sins committed through time worn customs in ‘Old Sins”, and lambasted capitalism in “Democracy in Action”. He juxtaposes affluence against laying people off jobs, a contradiction which epitomizes such contradictions in society.

The poet’s love and yearning for home so moved him that he declared in “Testament”, “… return my mortal remains to the land of unpredictable rains … land of water … tropical mother … place of my birth where my navel string was buried.”

One can go on and on writing of these gems of poems. These are gems not merely to be read and studied, but also to be committed to memory and quoted whenever the occasion warrants it, even read qe quo anima, as it were, with the mind.

It has been stated that the poet “shuns stylistic and structural orthodoxy”, but he has shown quite capably that he can handle rhymes in couplets and alternates, and these can be his chosen tool if he so desires. This is also brought out to some extent in “Roses are the Most Beautiful”, and to a lesser extent in “It’s A Dog’s Life”.

The poet has mastered the art of the short alliteration in phrases as “first finger in fugacity”, “querilous questions”, “crochety contentions” and “primary priority”, to name only a few.

Balwant might have stretched poetic license a bit for the uninitiated in the lexicon of the language with words like ‘sparsening’, ‘contumancies’, and ‘freugacity’, but each word is grounded in sound etymological validation.

When one reads Wild Flowers and compares its quality and content and the profundity of the word craftsmanship with what has come out of the West Indies and Guyana in contemporary times and even prior times, it goes without saying that Balwant has carved an indelible niche in the literature of the Region. For the last two decades he is the best to come out from Guyana and ranks with giants like Arthur J. Seymour, Martin Carter and Derek Walcott.

Although Balwant admits to starting poetry in the Teachers’ Training College, I crave his indulgence to remembering the nights in the now closed Quamina Street locale sipping coffee near to chairless tables. I am aware that he has many more poems and maybe another anthology of is in the making. He is indeed, “a brilliant star in the uncertain and hope-filled world of the immigrant in an American inner city, a world of harsh struggles, crippling loneliness, brief joy and an undiminishing aspiration for a lighter, brighter tomorrow.”

I would selfishly like to proclaim, however, that Balwant nascitur non fit, (as a poet that is.)

Wild Flowers is a must for all lovers of the written and spoken word.