After Poems, Psalms

In After Poems, Psalms, John Robert Lee puts twin dimensions of his poetry into a direct relationship. In using the fifteenth century form of the glosa, he makes extracts from Biblical psalms, core testaments of his Christian faith, as the cabeza, which form the poetic basis for the stanzas that grow from them. These explore the meaning of that faith to a man living in the neo-colonies of the Caribbean. In an island still oppressed by its history of enslavement, economic exploitation and environmental degradation, Lee’ s poems find solace not only in faith but in the spirit of resistance and often joyous creation in the arts of St Lucia and the region.

John Robert Lee is one of the group of significant Saint Lucian writers who are the younger contemporaries of the late Nobel Laureate, Derek Walcott. He is the author of elemental, (2008), Collected Poems 1975-2015, (2017), and Pierrot, (2020). His poetry appears in numerous magazines and anthologies, including the Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse. His reviews and columns appear widely, and he produced and presented radio and television programmes in Saint Lucia for over thirty years.