When Wordsworth began writing The Prelude at the age of twenty-eight, he imagined it as the gateway to a more distinguished poetic career still to come. At ninety, Ian McDonald’s “postlude”, also an enquiry into the growth of a poet’s mind, has the realism of knowing that his life as family man, sportsman, administrator in the sugar industry and Guyanese/Caribbean public intellectual is drawing towards closure. He writes ruefully, for instance, of the perils of “Falling Down the Stairs in My Ninetieth Year”. But what is still very much open and alive, in quite astonishing ways, is the facility for vivid memory and the gift – both instinctive and developed over many years – to turn this raw material into jewel-like poems. Here, the very immediate present – of garden, house and family – has equal force with what has arisen from the depths of the past. As an enquiry into the growth of a poet’s mind, we see him being shaped by family, extended by friends and altered by encounters with strangers and moments of epiphany in the natural world. We read of sadness and regret over the passing of the world of his contemporaries but also the joy in being alert to the beauty to be found in the smallest occasions. We read Ian McDonald’s poetry for the intrinsic pleasure of what he does with words, and for sharing with us the rare insight of what the world looks like at ninety.