Search results for ""Author John Robert Lee""

John Robert Lee’s Christian faith is always present in his perceptions of experience and in the shaping of his art, and even those who don’t share his faith should be grateful for this because he gives us a poetry of an empathetic sensitivity to human frailty, celebrations of the beauty of enduring love, prophetic anger in calling out injustices and a sense of the sacredness of the natural world and the terrible insults we offer it. It's a magnificent and varied collection in which different kinds of voices -- all JRL -- mesh together: the observational, the sacramental, the elegiac, the prophetic and the personal. It’s a collection in which four major suites of poems give the whole an organic unity, which is not to say that the individual poems that fall outside the suites don't make their fine contribution. The ‘Belmont Portfolio’, dedicated to Earl Lovelace, records a time spent on his own in the unfamiliar streets of Belmont in Trinidad in poems that catch the sense of being on the edge of adventure, that see the numinous behind the ordinary. The ‘Office Hours’ suite, with its gracious nods to W.H. Auden, is both an engagement with the hours of divine office and the Bible readings that go with it, and a very human series of reflections on that most universal of experiences – how we live through our diurnal cycles. There is the rousing, prophetic, Old Testament righteous anger of the ‘Watchman’ sequence, which reflects on the hell of living in Babylon and the gap between the deceits of ‘liberal democracies’ and the ghastly realities of their global crimes. In the last sequence, ‘What Remains to be Said’ the poet emerges to the front of the stage and speaks directly and confidentially to the reader. It is a sequence that gathers together what must be treasured as sustenance through ‘this Purgatorio’ of our times, reflections on how one can speak in an era where you are “collared in faith in agnostic seasons”, where the frequency of the deaths of those with whom you have shared the struggle is a “haunting against my faith in the Tree of Life” – and a wondering, slightly tongue-in-cheek: “approaching mid-seventies, what do I know?”

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This "magnificent act of scholarship" is a comprehensive author index of poetry, prose (fiction and non-fiction) and drama from the eastern Caribbean island of Saint Lucia. It also includes supporting materials, such as dissertations and critical works, which offer studies of the works of Saint Lucian writers, including Nobel Laureates such as Derek Walcott and the economist, Sir Arthur Lewis. While it lists the work of the internationally acclaimed of Saint Lucia, it also includes humbler literary contributions, such as recipe books and funeral programmes. Nothing that has contributed to the island's rich artistic legacy is omitted.

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The sacred and the profane, self and world, literature and politics meet in the figure of Pierrot. He is the sad clown, holy fool of literary tradition, the suffering artist who connects to Christ in his most human incarnation as Man of Sorrows. He is also the Pierrot Grenade of Caribbean carnival, the most literary of carnival figures who can spell anything, who carries a whip, but lashes with his tongue. Pierrot is both the bedraggled figure at the sordid end of carnival who is weary of the “Infernal cycles of mamaguy kaiso politricks”, and the risen Christ who, if you listen, can be heard to “crack His midnight robber word”. In his ninth collection of poems, John Robert Lee contemplates his 70th year in St Lucia and the sad chimes of mortality as friends and literary and cultural heroes leave this life. It’s a time for a weighing up of where domestic, political, literary and spiritual journeys have reached. It is a time of honest admissions but also renewed faith in all these journeys. This is no retired poetry steeped in reflective sorrow, but probably the most vigorous, demotic, experimental and intimate of John Robert Lee’s collections. More of the man in all his guises appears here, a confessional voice lightened by self-irony and humour. Sometimes Pierrot is an archetypal figure, sometimes he may be thought to be Lee himself. And if salvation is the ultimate prize, few have beaten down the Babylon of the great northern neighbour with a heavier, more righteous lash than Lee wields in his poem, “Who made me a stranger in this world”.

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These poems tell of a continuing journey and reveal a subtly changing voice. They represent a consistent and rewarding attempt to hold together in one space the things that matter. This is seeking first the kingdom of God; maintaining the community of men and women who incarnate that kingdom and make life meaningful; the beauties of St Lucia’s natural world and its rich traditions of folkculture; and the challenges and demands of poetry.John Robert Lee’s Collected Poems tell both of a continuing journey and a subtly changing voice but also of an underlying, consistent attempt to hold together in one space the things that matter. This is seeking first the kingdom of God; maintaining the community of men and women who incarnate that kingdom and make life meaningful; the beauties of St Lucia’s natural world and its rich traditions of folk-culture; and the challenges and demands of poetry.Whilst sometimes Lee’s poems involve a quiet self-communing, more often they are conversations with God and with those people who are close to him. At points they rise to being canticles of praise that express the experience of, or the yearning for the transcendent through the imagery of the visible world. And whilst the poems connect to the wider world of travel and world affairs, their touchstone is always St Lucia. Like Derek Walcott, like Kendel Hippolyte, Jane King and now Vladimir Lucien, John Robert Lee’s poems demonstrate how possible it is to find an enriching, puzzlingly complex and intellectually stimulating world in a small island society.The journey the poems tell is from the young man enthused with the energy of the radical decolonizing spirit of the 1970s, the years of deepening of Christian faith to the present of maturity and the acceptance of loss as well as gain, and the stamina needed for the continuing struggle for St Lucia to emerge from its colonial past and be ever more itself. In the later poems there are more glimpses of the private man who recognises that “My heart holds rooms I’ve never entered/ doors concealed, secret entrances.” And whilst over the forty years of the poems one hears always a personal, signal voice, over time the poems increasingly invest in the Kweyol language of the St Lucian folk as well as the voice of the English master and, latterly, display an growing interest in the relationship between poetry and the visual arts.

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John Robert Lee brings a quiet, reflective, often autobiographical approach to his concerns with Caribbean life, art and faith. Within carefully crafted formal structures – and some experimentation with traditional forms – he finds the space to give his voice and persona free rein. Whilst rooted in St. Lucia and Caribbean culture, he takes the whole world as his arena – as much at home writing about Boston as Castries.Undoubtedly the foremost Caribbean Christian writer of his generation, his is a truly incarnational view of faith, anchored in the reality of human experience and expressed in richly textured images of Caribbean landscapes, dress, street life, music, dance and his native Creole language. "Robert Lee has been a scrupulous poet, that's the biggest virtue that he has, and it's not a common virtue in poets, to be scrupulous and modest in the best sense, not to over-extend the range of the truth of his emotions, not to go for the grandiose. He is a Christian poet obviously. You don't get in the poetry anything that is, in a sense, preachy or self-advertising in terms of its morality. He is a fine poet."Derek Walcott.John Robert Lee is one of the group of significant Saint Lucian writers who are the younger contemporaries of Nobel laureate Derek Walcott.

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