“Soul’s very edge and promontory”: Exile and the Kingdom. Hilary Davies.

Enitharmon Press, 2016.

 John Robert Lee

The back-cover blurb on Hilary Davies’ Exile and the Kingdom says: “In her fourth collection…Davies embarks on pilgrimage – poetic, religious, psychological. Using a dazzling interplay of narrative and lyric line, she travels through real and imagined territory in search of answers to the great questions which preoccupy us as human beings.” I would have also alerted potential readers that the love poems to her dying husband must be among the most truly felt in any poetry.

In an interview with Martyn Crucefix for his blog (March 14^th, 2017), Davies says of this book that “our pilgrimage through life is in a very real sense an exile but how we approach it, are changed by it and by those we meet and love is also how we may approach the kingdom.” She added, “the central sequence of the book is about the loss, confusion, terror and celebration that the death of one we love occasions.” Concerning the sequence form, the poet remarks that she “found that discrete lyrics, unconnected to any wider context, were no longer sufficient by themselves to allow me to address the themes I wanted to address. I began to think in terms of a broader architectonic for the poems I wanted to write…”

Speaking to Terence Handley Macmath of the Church Times (January 5^th 2018), Davies comments on the audience for poetry, “the reader I have in mind is anyone who loves how language structures itself into poetry, and who also believes that this can say something redemptive about the human condition.” Of the religious tenor of her work (she is a practicing Catholic) she says “much of my poetry is a spiritual exploration and more and more so over the years. This, of course covers every aspect of life…and how all this relates to faith in a personal God….the fact that I’m a Catholic influences what I choose to write about. And my writing infuses my faith...”

With reference to a world that can overwhelm with its secular, consumerist indifference to the spiritual dimension, – an editor of an anthology of contemporary Christian poetry states: “some may still question any poetry of religious transcendence in a postmodern age..” That editor, David Impasto, notes on the section he titles “Wayfarers” in his anthology Upholding Mystery (1997): “by circumstance a pilgrim, it seems the Christian not only is rejected as an irksome countersign but is torn by love for a transient world that is both home and not home.” Hilary Davies’ poems are set in her home landscape of the Lea Valley, as well as that of Wales, France and Germany, a Europe for which she confesses great love.

Exile and the Kingdom was one of the best poetry collections I read in 2018. Substantial in content, images and shaped experience, finely observed, unpretentious, she maps her travellings to and through faith, her long love for Europe and her grief at the loss of her husband the poet Sebastian Barker (1945-2014) to whom the book is dedicated. The poems are heart-searched, sincere without proselytizing showiness. In the words of a review of her first collection The Shanghai Owner of the Bonsai Shop (Enitharmon, 1997), “Her language reveals true lyric gifts, while sustaining clear, lucid argument. Out of these poems comes a vision of brokenness transformed.” Indeed.

Her love poems to her late husband are moving, tender-rooted in their grief, even as she seeks to traverse the dark places.

“Grief is orphan, where once there was companion,

The turning to, the gesture, the shared, created world

Staked like a dull rag upon a picket,

A cage of longing hung beside a road.

Grief knows. She is the death in life,

Closer than our own bone.”

She is a fine poet of faith and transcendence in a materialist world which seems largely uninterested in such writing. Her work needs to be better known.

 

Across Country

“Across Country,” the first sequence of poems in seven parts, traces the beginning of the journey of faith, from childhood to adult resolutions. While Davies describes real journeys through real landscapes, the visionary and transcendent ‘etch the first surfaces of particularity/and settle in our souls.” Going west (to Wales?) “the streets were hollow and strange…The city tipped and hinged, And we crossed over the frontier into a translated land.” The opening lines are reminiscent of Dante’s classic opening of Inferno “Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself/In dark woods, the right road lost…”(Robert Pinsky). “Across Country’s” opening is resonant:

“How it all begins: this is what gets forgotten,

Unwilled and inarticulate, the dark start in the morning,

Being carried by gods out into the starry night.

We are silent to ourselves: no familiar landscapes,

No lintel, inglenook to shape or stable space,

Just the road and its rhythms.”

As with Dante or Bunyan, this journey begins with dark and an image of wilderness.

Like cinema montage, her scenes change from early morning car journeys to a boat crossing the channel to French countryside, “This fugue of difference, this rosary of place,” to “bars and hostelries” near rivers. One of her strengths is her delineation of detail which brings a dramatic quality to the unfolding narratives, and that with reference to both external and internal descriptions.

Martyn Crucefix, in his review of Exile and the Kingdom found there were “passages that stand comparison with the Eliot of the Four Quartets.” Section III of Across Country is one of those where Davies makes a typical Eliot transition of image and thought to offer a meditation on the movement from “fallacy and self-belief” to faith:

“How to distinguish the horizons of vision from our own folly’s chasm?

A book in a bookshop can wring the spell.

I held it there a year, a decade,

Sucked on the arguments of polity and governance,

Sedulous in the maze of fallacy and self-belief.

Very sweet are the seductions of the lamplit room

Whose geometries, unchecked, autarkic,

Unhouse humanity; and luscious the meretricious fruit

Of the ideology tree. A man may squander

His whole birthright in those dark woods.”

 

An assertion follows with unambiguous clarity:

“The lords of existence

Are neither economist nor philosopher

The Lord of existence

Shows himself not in systems

The Lord of existence

Is the sound behind everything

When everything is still.”

 

‘Across Country’ is so finely drawn, it could do with a close-reading of its own. The poet searches the tentative beginnings of conversion:

“When does the door open?

How does the ear prepare

For what it does not even know

It cannot hear?”

 

Love is the Hound of Heaven that pursues this pilgrim:

“So I crossed into church after church that summer,

Thinking of erudition, but beside me trod Love.”

 

Love, who will show

 “…with open palms the forms

To piece together to learn the inlay of faith.”

 

With this spiritual experience, the convert will face guilt that “builds a grim tunnel in the soul, Its starting point irretrievable, its end unattainable”; will experience the full weight of self-realisation before a new awareness of the presence of God: “The only way out now is on your belly Under the weight of heaven”; and the course across landscape and ocean and spirit leads “into the absolute inefficacy of anything but faith.” After all is said and done, “Only perdurance delivers. Not one night of weeping, nor the taverns of despair, Nor even the grandiose claims of conscience Suffice in the end.”

As traumatic as the new birth has been, “We are astonished as we turn to rest At the plains and forests and rivers over which we have come,” the pilgrimage is just begun. But like Bunyan’s Christian, there will be companions. This first sequence ends with love: “You came to me as in a waking dream And I knew instantly I had to go the hard way with you To learn how to love better.” So, they proceed: “Out of hope’s slaughterhouse, history, We pilgrims forever come.” This personal travelling with its topographies, is a palimpsest of all holy quests.

 

Songs from the Lea Valley; In the Valley of the Lot.

At the heart of Exile and the Kingdom are these sequences of poems which present the nitty-gritty of the mundane of the life of faith. Later, in Rhine Fugue, Davies will give attention to episodes of European history and in the final title sequence she will turn to psalms and prayers of her pilgrim’s progress using the form of liturgical or canonical hours, the offices of the church.

Hilary Davies has made her home for almost 30 years in the Lea Valley, on the eastern edge of London. In her interview with Martyn Crucefix she speaks of the cosmopolitan nature of the area, its historical significance to London, its ‘green’ beauty and the atmosphere provided by the river.

While the poems describe the landscape, she finds signposts to faith and its practice everywhere. She hears “prayer’s cadences out of a thousand mouths”; on Stamford Hill, her Jewish neighbor “sits in his garden: Orotund as butter he intones his Torah”; “the geese drive south Trailing hosannas over the estuaries”. Alert to annunciations and manifestations, she sees “Unnoticed under the buzz of our lives Beggars and saints sweep over the land.’ And in Abney Park, the stone “angels are praying.”

Following the best of Francis Thompson or T S Eliot, she provides an immediacy, a familiar recognition, of a contemporary English neighborhood.

 

“In the Valley of the Lot” is the longest sequence at the heart of the book. It is a “valley of the shadow of death,” a wilderness passage of grief at the dying of her husband, a dark night of the soul where doubts of the promises of faith and hope regarding the after-life are “mighty shadows,” a “dark tide which brings no tomorrow: Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow, sorrow.”

But this mournfulness has produced from its stricken memories some of the most moving and genuinely wrought love poems I have read anywhere.

Hilary Davies’ husband was the poet Sebastian Barker who died in 2014 after a sudden diagnosis of cancer. This love poetry is sharply etched with his dying and death, loss is the boundary she can already see with an acute, impossible desolation: “Ah, that I could fold my arms around time And so enchant her, She would not take you.”

This love is not some idealistic, mystical love between pious fellow-travellers, but sings in the frank, plain statement of the erotic, even as hovering “night’s cloak is cold and everlasting.” No Donne conceit here:

“Do to me with your broad hands

All the things that I would have you do.

I wish you delight from my breast

Arcing through your fingers.

I wish you succor from my thighs

As they learn to bear you. May our mouths

Feed on each other as on bread and apples.

Sweet, salt love, come away.”

 

The loneliness of sorrow, memories that are still fresh, the unbelieving transition between presence and absence, are not avoided:

“I said to myself, no matter, it is just the sunset

Over the perfect lawns making you melancholy;

Soon he will be by your side again

And all shall be well.”

 

But the hard reality of separation confronts her:

“Then abrupt on that sea path I noticed the air grown cold;

Like a swift ghost against the wall I knew

That here was an end to dreaming,

That you had done with discovery of what lay ahead of us,

All that we had been was rolling in on the shingle

And the road away from this headland

Led for me only out along its darkening foreshore

Where your love’s face scattered into farewell against the coming stars.”

 

The images in these poems, drawn from familiar and loved landscape and seascape, echoing classical metaphors, are the shaping forms that hold the love, melancholy, loneliness, despair:

“We are never prepared for this –

Never prepared for the dark lake,

For the boat with its sharp wake

Skimming across the water towards us,

For the immovable sorrow at the land’s edge

Where the waves flicker,

Where at the two worlds’ crossroads

Two mighty shadows meet.”

 

The notes sounded here to mark grief are true and without self-indulgent discord: “No one told me how like fear grief falls,”; “Grief takes the dearest intimacies you had And hangs them in a row marked never more-“. Despair overcomes faith: “Forward or back mean nothing Since not in this life nor anywhere Will they ever lead home to you.” “The pointlessness Of all that was. This simple thought destroys.” Dante-like, she cries out:

“There are not words to say

What this dull plain is like:

No water, ever; the stones like scurf

In a wind that frets with an unending cold

The stumps of happiness.

What moan breathes from the canyons,

What monstrous understanding

Paradise gives as she withdraws.”

 

But, lest we forget, as painful as these experiences are, this is a pilgrimage, and the sojourner does not lie down in Castle Despair. She will rise from the Slough of Despond. An ultimate darkness is not the end of the faithful: “How can the bowstring of my being snap When all this was ours?” And slowly but surely, grace comes to soothe:

“Only in this room when I lie on our bed

Can rest from these wild thoughts come – grace’s gift

Greater than flood or vanished continents:

Love of you matchless ever and darling in the palm of my hand.”

 

Rhine Fugue, Exile and the Kingdom

In her earlier collections, “In the Valley of the Restless Mind” and “Imperium” Hilary Davies had shown her deep interest in European history. In Rhine Fugue she casts a “taper of memory” over her first childhood visits to Germany, the history of Blucher’s crossing of the Rhine in 1814, the Jewish Quarter of Worms and the printing of Tyndale’s New Testament in Worms in 1526. Practical Jewish and Protestant faith under pressure of various persecutions are the inspiration for the narrative poetic meditations here:

“What kind of strength does it take

To cultivate roses in a time of war?

What kind of pilgrimage, to wait?

To kneel against the darkness in a blacked-out room?

To tend, invisibly, the roots of peace?”

Rhine Fugue is the most dramatic sequence of these poems which draws on historical events at the heart of European history. She has a gift for dramatic narrative and this is apparent in descriptions of her personal voyages as well as recreations of the past.

 

The final title-sequence, in 8 poems, uses the format of the liturgical hours or divine office, often referred to as the Breviary. “They mark out the day and the night, and are thus associated with different states of the soul, different spiritual aspirations, different signposts on the journey of life…canonical hours mark the divisions of the day in terms of periods of fixed prayer at regular intervals.” The present canonical hours, observed from Matins at 2 am through to Compline at 7 pm, used by the Roman Catholic Church, consist of seven, ie, Matins, Lauds, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline. While Davies starts with Nocturns, (and includes the other seven,) these as a term ceased to be used with Paul VI. Nocturns were sections into which the Matins were originally divided. Prime, one of the early hours, observed at 6 am, was also suppressed after Vatican 2.

So these liturgical hours are essentially times of prayer for the observant. Given all that has gone before, what are we to make of this poet/pilgrim’s version of a Breviary? How has she shaped this traditional religious form to her literary purposes?

In her 2017 interview with Martyn Crucefix, she reveals that this section of the book was first to be written. She also says that she ‘wanted to write something about the stages in my spiritual life up till then, including my conversion to Catholicism.” The structure she chose was “the liturgical hours or divine office…what was especially interesting to me was their symbolism, which is a dual one. They mark out the day and the night, and are thus associated with different states of the soul, different spiritual aspirations, different signposts on the journey of life.”

For this devotee, these closing poems are confessional prayers of self-revelation, anguished contemplation on the lived and suffered coordinates of experience that have taught and shaped faith; they are laments of a modern-day psalmist, marking the hours of “one who, from his night sweats Wakes in the livid hour before dawn and is afraid.” I agree with Martyn Crucefix that they bear comparison with the poems of Four Quartets and I would add, with the best religious verse, ancient and modern. The settings are contemporary, framing a common, recognizable human heart-searching that makes these meditations accessible.

The NOCTURNS section is divided into two. The first opens with the supplicant (kneeling, we imagine, if not prostrate), without dissimulation, pleading in the dark before dawn:

“Lord, let me come again into your presence.

The times are difficult, and night after night

Beneath the door curls the thin smoke of hypocrisy.

Sleep brings no respite but a throng of fretted images:

The rostra talking to the multitudes,

War’s insect engines on a desert wall,

The bulldozed coffins.”

 

“Doubt’s unlit well” tempts, the seeming unimportant smallness and inevitable end of humanity overwhelms: “What difference does the beetle, struggling with his dungball, Make, when the world’s willed to dissolution and the solar fire?”; the night-time confessional goes deeper into a kind of existentialist absurdity:

“…Then there’s the heartache

At the core of things: attachment, the blank certainty

Of letting go, the arbitrary wing of accident,

Wrong gene or partner, a lifetime bled into the dusty ground

Of non-fulfilment…”

Even the possible answers and solutions to the dilemmas of mundane existence, “the days go in and the days go out The cars and the buses and the trains round about All our doings…The daily bread and the weekly shop” – even those are overthrown in:

“.that night which throws us on our knees

And we lean out, retching, over the abyss.”

 

And out of the depths comes the cry: “Lord, do not leave me in this dreadful place.”

This is religious verse, well-conceived, well-wrought, of a high order.

 

I am not convinced that the second part of this section fits well here. It is a reminiscence of a “favourite, mercurial uncle” who may have died tragically. It seems to be an illustration from personal experience that teaches an important lesson, ie “the impossibility of loving begets despair, And despair kills.” But it does not seem to me to carry the momentum of the first section.

The other “hours” develop the theme of confession and contrition, expose “Those innumerable little capitulations to self-love.”, the weeping recognition that “mind, body, soul (were) So penetrated with duplicity we could not even see The canker in our face.”

These confessions are very Augustinian in their frank record of the “road of transgression.” But light breaks over the hours as dawn nears and “Grace falls like rain on a late summer afternoon.” “The travail of the contemplative” is blessed by insights and the opening of the soul’s eyes to miracle: “What miracles In the hedgerows do we pass by, unsaluted?” Indeed, from her cell, keeping the Book of offices, one given to prayer learns that “miracles are a conversation And do not proffer themselves to those who cannot hear.” And while, as the journey completes a cycle and the pilgrim ruefully admits “Hosanna’s the hardest, not the easiest, thing:”, Compline, the last office of the day, brings a certain calm and peace:

“Lord, let your servant at the soul’s very edge and promontory

Walk where the chapel of the fathoms grows

And saints lean from her windows against the night.”

 

Hilary Davies, in her Exile and the Kingdom has written some of the best poetry of our time. In the words of a blog commentator, responding to a review, she is a “much-neglected poet.” Her work deserves to be better known. Much of this book needs a close, annotated reading, so full it is of deep thinking of faith’s route, weaving of images, dramatic narration, insights into contemporary life and a reach beyond time and place to common human travailings, mediated by struggling ups and downs of this exile. Through such sojournings, the kingdom is built.

 

I don’t think that many writers and readers today would dispute the statement by the editors of Religion and modern literature: essays in theory and criticism (1975) that a common critical position today holds that “the religious dimension of literature is irrelevant.” In the same book, J. Hillis Miller, in a 1967 essay, proposes that ‘The poets of most value to us are the poets of today, those who can speak to us of our own experience.” Hilary Davies is a contemporary poet who speaks with skill and a true poetic gift about our shared experiences of faith, in a largely agnostic and secular world. She is not writing a tract to proselytize, but through her own journeys, her pilgrim’s progress, which include grief and loss, she shows how belief in the supernatural is possible and indeed necessary if we are to fulfil our human potential in a world of sacramental presence. As derided as this may be by critics, there is something to be considered in the words of Philip Sherrard (The Sacred in life and art, 1990): “But whatever his course, of this the artist must be sure: that only when his art possesses a sacred quality will it present a positive challenge to our technological world and to the degradation of human life which is endemic to it..”. Hilary Davies is a poet who recognizes that there is a “deeper world than this,” and is on a frontline of current poets and artists carrying the banner inherited from many who have gone before and left their pilgrim testimony with us. I am pleased to have found her work and this book.

 

 

 

Hilary Davies’ other poetry publications are The Shanghai Owner of the Bonsai Shop (1997), In a Valley of This Restless Mind (1997) and Imperium (2005), all published by the Enitharmon Press.

John Robert Lee is a Saint Lucia writer. His Collected Poems 1975-2015 (2017) and Pierrot (2020) are published by Peepal Tree Press. His Saint Lucian writers and writing: an author index is published by Papillote Press, 2019

 

 http://preelit.com/2021/03/14/belmont-portfolio-for-earl-lovelace/

Belmont Portfolio. For Earl Lovelace.

 

                             Art - The Return. (c) Jackie Hinkson

Pilgrim SuiteJohn Robert Lee

1.

who will come to the red gate with the red mail tinbox
its pillars topped with red pyramids
who will walk past the yellow hydrant
and stare through the closed gate
at the thick variety of garden
wrought-iron barricade round the verandah
who will see the green banana leaf
peering over the grey wall
for who might come through the red gate on Pelham Street?


2.

‘If I feel the night
move to disclosures or crescendos,
it’s only because I’m famished
for meaning.’ – Li-Young Lee

persistent lament of wood-doves
who, who has gone, gone forever?

orange wafer of sun settling to horizon’s eclipse

evenings shuddering with unrequited affections

I would love you with ardent hunger
beyond your name, your ancient eyes, sensual lips
tattoo on your left breast
the inexorable news of your dying

in this hour
in which I love you
I am a poem without a theme
without a clear image of you
a line to follow
a procession of remembrances to metaphor
no half-rhyme rhythms to match ambiguity

going past your old house near the Baptist chapel
and Chinese grocery
the blue estate-wall on my left with its crimson border
trees behind it raucous with afternoon parrots
a cock under the avocado tree crowing for some epiphany
wanting a Creole love song from Philip Martelly and Kassav
to make me recall your sensuous hips
incomprehensible smile perfect mouth
your various infidelities
like the turning familiar corner into which I bend my eyes
alert for unwelcome surprises

how can I love you without you

these November days close with apocalyptic cloudbursts over darkening horizons

who, who has gone, gone forever
wood-doves lament persistently.


3.

  ‘for he looked for a city which has foundations.’ – (Hebrews 11:10)

how can the last way out
not be a dirt-track
moving under a canopy of trees
their dark barks turning white
green foliage bowing over your passing
and somewhere in all that good bush
angels stroll, you are sure, fluting like ground-doves
their wings breezing above like casuarinas
near the beach-stone edge of Pigeon Island –
you gave me this Bible-text card
with that dirt-track road
between green trees
and their whitening barks
when we met in the City of Palms
in that city of refuge, city of priests
and beyond my chaste prayers
my chastening desire
you pressed my hand to your lips
and left it there
all these kind years –
I have kept it in my Book of Offices
all your faithful hours
all this becoming, as they say, one flesh
and it is, I think
a true sighting
on that sacred card with its scripture text
of the last road I want to walk with you
the road that goes my love
to the City of Holy
angels fluting like wood-doves
down the last dirt-track of Earth
beside the grace-filled trees
and their whitening barks.


4.

those who know such things
say our spiral galaxy, planets and further quasars,
the space-time continuum on which they curve orbits
are expanding fast, away from themselves
into some blue-black vacuum of solitary, dark matter –

like those cosmological stars
seems we are speeding away from each other
little time for intimacy of love’s spaces
distracted by widening ellipses of the settled familiar
falling off into dark holes of self-centred universes –

there is a Heaven in which we speed towards each other
through infinite expanses of Spirit
dancing to holy nebulae carrying our names,
to enter welcoming celestial bodies
and an everlasting, ever-extending consummation.


5.

strange old rubble wall
coming through the wet window of the airport bus:
different-shaded, different-sized stones
from sidewalk up to some indeterminate,
abstract, unfinished, uneven top,
looks blackened, as though burned,
and then, more even clay bricks finish the wall
which holds rust and red metal doors –
the humans of Port of Spain
walking past it, the traffic lights and pedestrian crossing
might know who the strange wall is and its story,
is it historical artefact, crumbling edifice forgotten by the council
an unknown artisan’s work…
but it raining, the bus moving slowly in traffic
we look at bridges, torrential canals, white mosques,
bars and billboards cruising under drizzle,
the young people singing Chronixx, and
a category 5 hurricane beating up the Atlantic.

This poem is taken from PN Review 257, Volume 47 Number 3, January - February 2021.

 

The Passion and Resurrection Canticles

(c) John Robert Lee

The Passion and Resurrection Canticles

  

John Robert Lee

Easter 2017

Castries, Saint Lucia

The Passion and Resurrection Canticles

(for Charles Cadet)

I.

Prologue: The alabaster flask

  

Over the bowed Head, the anointing oil of nard

pours from Mary’s broken alabaster flask—

certainly, she filled that room with the fragrant adoration of her Lord;

certainly, even then, some grudged Him that embalming, with their indignant jealousy—

you heard it in the thief’s voice, sneering at the poor;

and the Master, raising His burial, raising her memorial, raises their approaching loss,

beyond the maddening fragrance of the pure

ointment. But the bedeviled thief rose in envy, and over Christ, his bottled hatred broke.

  

Caiaphas

“Who is this, this peasant prophet, wailing shoah on the city?

What is this riot of rags and branches down the thoroughfare?

And why this bacchanal of blasphemy resurrecting from Bethany?

Which Balak sends this Balaam’s foal to mock Messiah?

Where next this din of thieves, this unwashed brood of publicans?

Will they impale the merchants and the bankers and the priests on their hosannas

when they’ve stormed the precincts of the porch?

While their ambitious carpenter withers, as usual, in some forgotten Arimathean sepulchre?”

Berith

  

Bitter herbs, bread unleavened, wine, and lamb slain between the two evenings—

do the twelve comprehend they are settling the last rites of Exodus, sipping the watered dregs of that final Pascha?

And beyond fiction, in the Servant’s holy hands, the betraying heel. And the flat-footed denials. And the splayed doubts. And other such leavenings.

Out of the common dish comes the separating sop to deepen their perplexity.

So there, above some obscure alley in His City, all our wretched story— Eden, Sinai, Golgotha—

is passed over, for His Bread, His Wine, His bitter Tree.

 Later still, such talk under the brooding night! Then prayer, a hymn,

and over the Kidron, into Gethsemane.

Gethsemani

  

What commenced in the other garden begins to end here,

in the shadow of an olive mill by a black brook.

“Behold, We have become like one of them, to bear

their sorrows and their griefs.” Let the wheel break

this Fruit on every tooth and tread. Bruise

the Seed under the trampling heel of the Bull

of Bashan. Pour the sweating barrel

of this agony into the cupping palms of God.

  

“Ecce homo”

“O Galilean, robed in purple, crowned with thorns,

is this Your estate? Is this Your kingship,

reduced to the scourge of their envy and spit? God born

of man, behold Your truth: silver kisses treacherous palms, shape-shifters

rend their costumes at cock-crow, the Pavement is soiled

by the desolation of Your bloody Purity. Look Carpenter,

is Caesar not adored, is Barabbas not preferred?

See, Holy Fool, You and Your Jews, I wash my hands of You!”

Friday

They leave Him nothing but irreducible nakedness—

no fig-leaf girdle, no swaddling cloth, no seamless tunic;

they impale the battered Scarecrow on the Skull’s brow; their final curses

perforate the darkening skin of the sun; His distending knuckles

claw the veil of the God-forsaken air; yet, even now,

He thirsts only for the sour wine at the end of the hyssop branch; stricken

between earth and heaven, His heart opens to a new covenant,

and pours its blood and water on the Father’s reconciling Hands.

Epilogue: Piéta of Joseph of Arimathea

“He was all scattered, empty-limbed, exhausted, gone,

when I gathered Him off the stake. O my Son,

my Son! I was more Your son than You were mine,

Your tentative disciple, peeping out the Council’s shutters for Your Kingdom.

O my wounded King! Holy, Holy, Holy Child! O my dear,bruised Prince!

O Father, receive Him in our poor linen, swathing His torn

flesh. May these paltry spices herald His approach

to Heaven’s Throne. O LORD, give this Your Servant rest in Your eternal Rock.”

II.

Risen Man

i.

“Have you ever shaken hands with a man who was dead?

Have you ever looked into the laughing eyes of a man who beat death?

Have you ever sat next to such a one and shared his salt bread?

Friend, do you know the incomparable odiferousness of the breath

of a resurrected man? Friend, have you been led in Zion’s psalms

by a voice that scattered the doomed wealth

of Satan’s domains?  Stranger, I have known the encompassing arms

of such entombing and embalming Grace.”

ii.

O Lord Christ, that we might,

with hearts' mouths hushed, see You

take the backyard-oven bread

You share with us, see Your hands

raise that plump loaf up into

this day's lavender end,

know with burning, blessed

sight, it's our Master bends

and breaks those dry-crust ends

of breasts of Paix-Bouche bread.

“In Caravaggio’s ikon”

In Caravaggio’s ikon of Thomas seeing Christ
all eyes are locked to the doubter’s firm finger
poking around the torn flesh, under


the strong hand of the Carpenter. Thomas,
Apostle to our secular, mocking, murderous
new age, meeting his worst-case scenario
with the firm grit of flesh under his thumb,
that index of incarnation— incarnation, Immanuel
God is with us — under the impossible rubble,

as we claw at the unimaginable earthfall, Immanuel—
over the body of someone’s son fallen in crossfire,
in shrieking shadowlands of betrayal,

through terminal disorientation of disease, Immanuel.
Because that wound is real, the death was certain,
here, beyond reason, beyond the apocalypse

of private disasters, is something else,
is Life beyond life, beyond heartbreak,
beyond assassination, beyond the tremblor

at 3 in the afternoon, beyond the amnesiac cancer of the mind.
Here, under our finger, is faith, here is hope,
and He asks us, against the brutal heel on the locked door,

the harsh fist of imploding earth,
the shroud covered bier—
“Love one another.”

So, faith is certain

So, faith is certain of tomorrow’s epiphany
but how to meet the apocalyptic moment of now
under fallen colonnades of the Presidential palace

tent cities of cholera and rape and empty-bellied children
the recurring decimation of mud in the kitchen
friends going to dementia, decrepitude and tumours

and in honest mirrors, the apparent dysfunctions,
slipping names, insomnia, gathering pill boxes
and out of reach, envied flirtations with perfect lips,

sloe eyes and teasing hips. Add inescapable
anxieties, dead-end jobs that pay bills,
no prizes, no awards, the country grown strange and foreign,

citizens mocking the devalued currency of art—
so, how to meet the apocalyptic hour
though faith is certain of the promised parousia?

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”."

Caribbean Literary Heritage - Lee

https://t.co/3apAPjHdHx

JOHN ROBERT LEE

What is the first thing you wrote?

I don’t know if I can remember the very first thing. But I do remember, after I left secondary school in 1967, and was working at a bank, I began to write a sequence of poems in an exercise book, which I recall, was about my father. Before that, at school, while I had always done well at literature and languages, I never wrote creatively. My first poems were published in 1970, in Link magazine, a St. Lucian literary journal, edited by Barbadian Stanley Reid who was living in St. Lucia. Two poems, titled “John 3:16” and “Rainbow.” One a religious theme, the other on racial issues. I was then at Cave Hill UWI, where as a literature student, I had begun to write in a more focused way. Link magazine, the first of its kind in St. Lucia, ran from 1968-1970. Caribbean Literary Heritage will be pleased to know I have those issues, well bound.

Who do you write for?

I ultimately write for myself and for those who will read my work. I like to think I write for St. Lucian and Caribbean readers, readers of poetry and prose anywhere, people interested in faith and art themes, Caribbean life. But ultimately, when I sit to write, I am writing first for myself, to put down as best and as clearly as I can, whatever themes are before me at the moment. I use the guidelines of “truth, beauty and harmony” to shape what I am doing. The words of Michael Mitchell, who wrote in an obituary on the late Wilson Harris, adapting Blake, sum up for me what I aim for: “grounded in the real world, transformed by metaphor, cultivating empathy, having a universal perspective." While this particularly refers to poetry, I also write scrupulously and with attention to detail and accuracy in my fiction and non-fiction (essays, reviews.)

While I move easily between free-forms and more formal type verse, I like the discipline given by formal structures, those I copy or those I create. I am strong on music, image, metaphor, beauty of line, in my poetry. While we hear much of “anti-lyrical” poetry, while we see much of a kind of obscure surrealism in modern poetry, I lean more to the descriptive-narrative styles, with substantial content (in theme and image) and with a fairly strong dramatic quality. Derek Walcott is a major influence. In recent years, I have been writing much ekphrastic poetry, responding intuitively to visual art of all kinds, including photography.

What was the first Caribbean book you read?

I honestly don’t remember, but I do recall early readings of George Lamming’s novels, Roger Mais, and I must have read Walcott. Once I got into Caribbean literature, in the late sixties, I read many anthologies of poetry and stories and grew familiar with the writers of the time.

How many Caribbean writers from the 1940s and 50s could you name?

Without taking up the space, I can say that from the late sixties, before I went to Cave Hill, UWI, in 1969, I had become familiar with the major and minor writers of the time. My friendship with persons like Patricia Ismond, McDonald Dixon, Stanley Reid and Roderick Walcott enabled me to discover the canon of the time, to engage in discussions of our literature. So I could name quite a few if needed. In 1972, I was at the first Carifesta as a stagehand, and was privileged to be in the company of many of our writers who were there.

How many women?

Phyllis Allfrey, Jean Rhys, Louise Bennet, Sylvia Carew, Paule Marshall. Pulling these from top of my head now.

Which writer do you wish you knew more about?

Am not sure. Perhaps early pioneers like Una Marson. I need to read more of Wilson Harris.

What is the earliest piece of Caribbean writing you have read?

In some anthologies, I have seen poems by writers from the 18th century.

Does the Caribbean’s literary past matter to you?

Yes it does. I have a keen interest in literary history. I consider myself something of a “literary archivist”, collecting photos and other kinds of information about our Caribbean literary tradition. I would like to see more biographies of our writers (and artists) and more studies of literary developments. Anne Walmsley’s “The Caribbean Artists Movement 1966-1972”(1992), Andrew Salkey’s Havana and Georgetown Journals (1971,1972), Bruce King’s two books on Derek Walcott and the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, Eddie Baugh’s various books on Walcott’s life and work, Laurence Breiner’s book on Eric Roach and the politics of Caribbean Poetry (Peepal, 2008) are still pioneering works in a field waiting to be explored and filled.

Who are our most important writers today?

Many of the older writers are still important: Walcott, Brathwaite, Naipaul, Harris, Rhys, Lamming, Hearne among others. Lorna Goodison, Mervyn Morris, Earl Lovelace, Ian McDonald, the late Victor Questel, Dionne Brand and those who follow that first “Golden Age” generation. Many new voices have arrived, many of whose works are rewarded by big prizes: Kwame Dawes, Claudia Rankine, Marlon James, Vahni Capildeo, Kei Miller, Vladimir Lucien, Tiphanie Yanique, Ishion Hutchinson, Shivanee Ramlochan, Ann-Margaret Lim, Richard Georges, Jennifer Rahim among others. These and their many other colleagues are important. Time will tell, of course, how truly important and significant they are. Then there are many Caribbean writers who have grown up in the diaspora: Caryl Phillips, Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy and others. Peepal Tree Press, Carcanet and Papillotte Press are doing a great job in publishing the works of the older and newer writers. And we have not even touched writers from the other language areas of the Caribbean.

What are you reading now?

Always too much piled up on my desk to read, lol. But these days I am reading Loretta Collins Klobah (Ricantations), Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné (Doe Songs), an English poet, Hilary Davies (Exile and the Kingdom,) Kwame Dawes (City of Bones), Jacob Ross’ short stories, “Tell no one about this.”.  I have also been dipping into a casebook on the recently deceased Garth St. Omer and a fascinating book by Jean Antoine-Dunne, “Derek Walcott’s love affair with film.” This means finding time to read in between a full time job and other activities, including my theological reading and my own writing. But bit by bit, I get a sense of what our contemporaries are doing. In earlier years, I did more reviewing and often think I would like to do more again, in response to all I am reading and all that is happening.