“John Robert Lee is a singular voice in Caribbean Literature. He is a poet of rare authority, deep insight and profound compassion who walks the shifting boundary line between praise and lament to produce stunning works that intercede for and bide-up humanity. In the way that we might look to the psalms for strength and solace, "After Poems, Psalms" should be received as a gift, a balm and a cause for celebration. Here is a companion to assist spirit wrestlers and lovers of poetry in their quest to identify the numinous in both the human and the natural worlds. Thank you, Robert! ”
Lorna Goodison, Former Poet Laureate of Jamaica, 2017-2020. Her Collected Poems, 2017 and Mother Muse, 2021 are published by Carcanet Press. She was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2019.
“What sustains you is a faith, which feeds your vision. While I do not share your faith, though its languages were fed to me from early, and the poetry I have kept, I do experience your visions, made of nature, inspired by biblical language, by the languages that have been inspired by other poets, their music and words, which have been created to transform the imperial visions which have brought about such obscenities in our world that we have had to save and sustain ourselves, nourish ourselves anew. Of course, there were poets from within those imperial cultures, many, who too sought to remake their world whose abuse of power wreaked havoc. Your work contributes to that remaking. I sense that coming across the water from Guadeloupe and Martinique, Cesaire and St John Perse have infected your glosas, coming to meet up with Walcott – those immediate ones, but many others, as I say, who you call upon, who have helped you form your own language.
Poems, canticles, psalms now glosas! I read your work this way. You call upon beauty, with thanksgiving. ”
Lawrence Scott, Trinidadian novelist and poet. His Looking for Cazabon, 2024 (poems) is published by Papillote Press.
“It is always difficult to bring God into poems, lest the words are too slick with resolution, make the poem’s journey slide off the page too quickly. Lee’s poetry makes us walk shoulder to shoulder with him by the telling way he has arranged the poems-so we traverse through human-voiced verses up to the altar of Scripture. In Les Murray’s poem Easter,1984, he writes of Christ’s time on earth as ’we had raised up evolution, it wouldn’t stop being human.’ Lee’s poems in After Poems, Psalms never stop being human as he fleshes out the word into his own pilgrimage of faith. Each time a different journey with a step-by- step struggle. Sometimes historical, sometimes cultural, sometimes as personal as old age. This traversing is done with a quietude of language that is Lee’s hallmark. Indeed, E.E. Cummings’ words resonate with his style: ‘I am a little church no great cathedral.’ Thus, Lee’s lamenting lines linger with the transformative power of a steady, searchful prayer.”
Nancy Anne Miller, Bermudian poet. Her Selected Poems is published by Valley Press U.K. 2024.
“Lee’s time-assured conviction, his hard-earned resonances, evoke profound rejoicing in landscape, woodsmoke, seasons dry and fecund. His celebrations of Saint Lucian life and memory, of Caribbean society past and present, remain undiminished even in the sharing of his many weighty disquiets. Secure in his faithful observation, Lee conjures privacies and confidences from empty rooms and abandoned street corners, managing to avoid the foreboding despair to which so many poets are gravely susceptible. There is no hiding behind missals, no sense of a pulpit persona speaking down at you. His is a graceful, silvering intelligence, weaving image, message, textural quality without seeming predictable, complacent or trite.
Reminiscent, insightful, often defiant, this voice of Lee speaks its uncomfortable veracity as confidently as it sings its psalms of praise. The work ascends and takes you with it. Full of light… whether panoramic or intimate, Lee delivers his towering truth.”
Adrian Augier is a Caribbean Laureate of Arts & Letters, and an award-winning Saint Lucian writer, producer and mas’man. For his contributions to regional art and culture, he has received the Saint Lucia Medal of Merit (gold) and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the West Indies. His Navel String (poems) was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2012.
Cover Art: “Poems from Saint Lucia” by Sir Llewellyn Xavier, Saint Lucia
