Sketches and Canticles of Lent

© John Robert Lee

Sketches and Canticles of Lent

after Shallon Fadlien

Pierrot – Mardi Gras

Filthy feathers, that painted shoe, trampled headpiece, etcetera

choking drains down the route,

street-light blinking out, stale roti

baddening the guts, your eyes sharp for midnight bandit

or coke jumbie looking to make ole mas

with the unwary  —

                                    you clown prince, you celebratory idiot

you forget she was Coolie Devil original,

Jab-Jab Mistress, maker of scourges?

Socialite – Ash Wednesday

God, to be outta this talk-show bakanal

these infernal cycles of mamaguy kaiso politricks

perpetual, shameless, cell-phone scandals

and all else; man gone cold in Toronto

landlord looking for his portion,

me sleeping with my fantasies —

in the penitential procession

the priest and his boys washing

you, beloved masquerader, in their platter of ashes.

Masque – Good Friday

We know the triumphant end of that old scenario:

disembowelled shroud, vacant catacomb

incredible gossip of love-struck women

whose eyes and hands and arms

encompassed the impossible incarnate eternal,

the risen God —

                                    the empty mask, inanimate

signature of death’s humanity

crosses to centre stage before that tremendous denouement.

© Art: Masque by Shallon Fadlien

Poem in Pierrot. Peepal Tree, 2020.

I am pleased to let you know that Peepal Tree Press, my publisher, is announcing the publication of my new poetry collection, Pierrot, on February 20th.

It is my third book with Peepal. (In 2019, Polly Pattullo of Papillote Press published my Saint Lucian writers and writing: an Author Index. I have published several chapbooks and books of my own under my Saint Lucian imprint Mahanaim Publishing.)

Thanks to my editor and publisher Jeremy Poynting and his hard working manager Hannah Bannister. The cover art is by Saint Lucian artist Shallon Fadlien who lives in Canada.

The write-up below is from the Peepal Tree web site and its section on upcoming books. Congratulations and all the best to my fellow Peepal writers with new books on the way.

And we continue to send congratulations and best wishes to Roger Robinson, Tdad/UK who won the prestigious T S Eliot Prize for his A Portable Paradise, published by Peepal. Continuing thanks also to Bocas LitFest, Calabash, Nehesi Publishers and the St. Martin Book fair and others at home and in our diaspora who make space and opportunity for writers to present their work through readings and book fairs. The NGC-Bocas annual awards are now among the most anticipated at home and abroad.

And thanks again to Peepal Tree and the hardworking folks there who since 1985 have been the foremost publishers of Caribbean and Black British literature. Amazing range of poetry, prose fiction and non-fiction if you look close. So many of Peepal's writers are now recognized names all over the literary world.

We press on

jrl

From Peepal tree web site:

"The sacred and the profane, dialogues with 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, and 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. The two meet so that 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, you can hear “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 both honest admissions but also renewed faith in all these journeys. 

If any of this suggests a retired poetry steeped in reflective sorrow, far from it. This is the most vigorous, demotic and experimental of John Robert Lee’s collections. There are new explorations of poetic forms such as the glosa, homages to the poetry of writers from Dionne Brand to Francis Thompson, the literary equivalent of the ekphrastic poems that have been appearing in his recent work. Pierrot is probably the most intimate of 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”."