THE POSSIBILITY for visual imagistic poetry and prose was not confined to Seymour’s breakthrough verse in ‘Over Guiana, Clouds’, since the small nucleus of local writers he nurtured through the outstanding Guyanese writers’ quarterly, ‘Kyk-Over-Al’, shared the influence of his time-structured cinematic style launched by ‘Over Guiana, Clouds’.
We see this in the fabulous opening chapter of Mittelholzer’s ‘Children of Kaywana’, in ‘A Morning at the Office’, ‘Thunder Returning’, and ‘The Weather Family’. We see it in Wilson Harris’s opening of ‘Palace of the Peacock’, in ‘Heartland’, in ‘The Eye of the Scarecrow’.
Harris’s initial novels were quite imagistic, because, like his peers, Seymour and Mittelholzer, he began as a writer when cinema had a major cultural impact on the local creative subconscious. The style is not subject to a ‘trend’ of literature the dust will settle on, because it is not the ‘story’ as content that is the judge of this literature’s worth, but each imagistic line of verse, or sentence of fiction.
Seymour’s verse already carried within it the technical structures of the cinema, instrumental classical music, Jazz, and even the imaginative window of painting.

National identity

The eleven sections of ‘Over Guiana, Clouds’ make poetic pictures with words. They comprise Guyana’s history. We contemplate: ‘Kyk-Over-Al/Strange name for stones, a heap of stones/ But a strong name to take the imagination.’ He shows us the forgotten, now only imagined, lonely pioneer acts almost 400 years ago which gave birth to Guyana’s National Identity today.
He demonstrates by example what constitutes the collective value of such an identity by revealing his sheer human respect for the young unknown Dutch ‘post-holders’, who, far away from home, in the wind, the rain, and the eerie jungle at night on the Wild Coast of Guiana, held their posts at various 17th Century isolated forts.
This is the exemplary role of a poet of his quality, born of a race first introduced as slaves to these shores by these same Dutch pioneers, yet he still has the comprehensive objectivity and intellectual maturity to celebrate these paradoxical records which formulated Guyana’s national identity. ‘Over Guiana, Clouds’ continues with his introduction of Raleigh, at times impersonating his voice.
Next he visualizes ‘Slaves/ Humming in the twilight of the shanty door’, and makes us feel their horrible bondage which reflects the sadistic contradictions of European colonisation.
‘Over Guiana, Clouds’ progresses like an avant-garde film, changing as Guiana changes, and indeed it is the poetic forerunner of Mittlelholzer’s ‘Kaywana Trilogy’.
By the 6th section, we have arrived at the modern era of the 1940s: ‘And the railway pencils a line to the Berbice river/ Villages broaden their shoulders and sugar booming / Schools spring up suddenly to dot the coast/…The races fade into a brown stained people/ And the Guiana spirit rises/ Stretching’.
By the 7th section, we have arrived at one of Seymour’s favourite topics: The capital of Georgetown, and his images are superb: ‘On the black/ Vast undulating bosom of the river/ Ploughing a furrow for the Market Square/ The white late ferry boat comes smoothly on.’
The lines begin to shrink; we are in a vivid film of urban Georgetown with its night scenes: ‘The radios play Jazz/ The sailors in clusters/ Staring at hotels/ Before the dark stairs/ Yawn and swallow them/ Along the street/ From cinema/ Come folks in pairs/ Heels echo sharply/ Ground on sand/ Ascend a stair.’
And in a later poem, ‘Georgetown Sequences’ we read: ‘Learn/ The sacred syntax of the city, The slender brilliant girls cycling together.’

Self discovery/national identity

Seymour’s open form in most of his poems after ‘Over Guiana, Clouds’ became a process of self-discovery linked to the broader theme of national identity. The continuous door to the present he opened for today’s writers reveals an exciting permanence based on contemporizing local history with the linguistic exploration of line or sentence, and makes adherence to any succession of literary trends redundant.
His poems become events made in the perpetual presence of time, of dream, of reality made in the image of a shared national identity. His famous poem, ‘There Runs a Dream’ is perfect evidence of this:
‘There runs a dream of perished Dutch plantations
In these Guiana rivers to the sea.                                                                                                                                                                       
Black waters, rustling through the vegetation
That towers and tangles banks, run silently
Over lost stellings where craft once rode
Easy before trim dwellings in the sun
And fields of indigo would float out broad
To lose the eye right on the horizon.
These rivers know that strong and quiet men
Drove back a jungle, gave Guiana root’.
History and normal everyday life exist on one plane, feeding the national identity with a poetics of pleasure: ‘Next door a woman runs her poultry farm/ And there Ramjohn goes wading through the rice/ His shoulders glistening in the broad white sun/ On other days rain shrouds the house with showers/ And blankets vision with its fine grey hood.’ (Over Guiana, Clouds)
The poet finds and preserves the particular beauty of everyday Guyanese life: ‘In my fabulous December/ Shining eyes of children/ Grasping the toy-happy season/ Tight in their little fists/ Groups of laughing boys/ Dash pell-mell in their yachtings/ Chasing along crowded pavements/ Limber girls/ Flaunt their shapely banners/ Along the avenue’. (Composition in December)
And again: ‘As Christmas comes, December breeze/ Will bring a coolness in the dawn/ And childhood memories long gone’. (Glory of Georgetown)
On the whole, A.J.Seymour’s ‘Collected Poems’ end up being more relevant both to the past foundation, and the ongoing contemporary manifestation of Guyana’s national identity in its most ordinary, quotidian styles than any other published collection by a Guyanese poet up to 2010.