A Work of Art

Sep 30, 2018 Book Review…, Features / Columnists

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Book: Collected Poems (1975-2015)
Author: John Robert Lee
Critic: Glenville Ashby, PhD

John Robert Lee’s Collected Poems is a work of existential depth, a collage of sentiments desperately searching for meaning. His is a soul tortured, a heart scathed. Times of despair, angst and wistfulness emerge from oceans of youthful buoyancy and anticipation. His is a journey wrestling with misfortune and sure signs of emotional brutality. He is weighed down, anchored by the pestilence of love unrequited, disquieted by love’s distrust. But he peers through the mystic veil and his work takes on an epistemological tenor.

Collected Poems is an interpretative work hoisted unto a rich poetic, colourful landscape. Lee leans on the abstract but we are never dazed by an overly cryptic, not a definable narrative.
In Papa Bois, arguably Lee’s most provocative offering, a young man seeks answers to life’s perennial questions. ‘Bois,’ the Caribbean’s mythical, phantasmagoric character tantalizingly prods, “You are young, go ask the world, and when you find no answers you will return to find me here, an old man, by the river, by the tree. Go ask the world why good men always meet only scorn and hate and why evil rule the world. Go ask the world, ask the world! (…)
Throughout this artful oeuvre, there is an unmistakable esoteric element. Time is hardly linear as we think, but is ‘quantum,’ mysterious, and perplexing. Caught we are in a time capsule that dizzyingly pilots our emotions. No longer are we in control. This notion is captured in the duality of j’ouvert where the spirit of light and darkness, and fall and rebirth find expression.
Lee’s passion screams for attention, “In this dread season, I reach for you and hope you well…In tears and desperate fumbling, weary of the mountains’ mermaids and their mist I reach for you. Symbols harden…Falling fast to Easter’s joyous heights the weeks are tumbling over Wednesday. May noonday’s dusty truths remove all shadows, and root this love, all stark, all knotted…we reach out for the fragile, flashing triumph of the wreaths, the ultimate calm of the morning dew.”
A City Affair is syncopated with Davidic cries and hope. Forlorn love in a city is ravished by time. Emotions, like the city, meander through a cacophony of competing feelings. Memories are rife and so is the present. They collide and Lee comments, “I guess our island cities age with us – too-familiar corners turn weary with worn paint houses that once welcomed you lean into broken steps grime has grown dirty great at the head of certain streets.” (…)
In the same breath, he yearns for times more comforting: “And I see I have gone to fictions of memory asking of love now as a man searches the warm ashes of a long marriage to find again, if he can, the first coal…And O, I fear, I yearn, I hope for these I do love, how doubt that I love, beyond my heart’s flooding boulevard for these I plead, I pray, O Christ Your enrapturing Grace.”
Lee clothes the human experience, from creation to dissolution, in ontological language. We are expressions of the elements. From the indiscernible (air) to the tangible (earth) and to passion and sins (fire) and the feminine (water) that assures our continuance, we are the innately elemental. In this hermeneutical writing he concludes, “Start with an image of water – in the fire of erupting ends of days in the turquoise depth of earth’s mourned in the blue-dyed surging of air.”
In Sphinxe, the Tower of Babel comes alive, unconquerable, and impervious to our piercing enquiries. This is life, bare and naked. “Do you dare to enter the navel of her world the enigmatic neither come nor go to her watching your every moving thought,” he writes.
Lee is at his philosophical best in Line (for Derek Walcott at 75). He probes, reasons, theorizes. In seamless, interrupted cadence he muses on consciousness, providence, redemption and the mysteries of the unseen world. Indelibly, almost hauntingly he asks, “Did Blake see angles sitting in the neighbours’ tree? Did an angel smile at me on a train platform in cold Boston one winter? Will Christ come with Ezekiel’s four-faced cherubim and their fiery wheels”?
In Mid-December, Mid-Afternoon, Lee leaves just enough room for predilections, political tastes and aesthetics. From the opening salvo, “On the radio, classical music from horizon-clear Martinique ,” to its conclusion, “On the radio, Creole music of Malavoi from Martinique,” there is levity, a refreshing tranquility to his mind.
Undeniably, Collected Poems is a gestalt of literary wonderment. With piercing philosophical insight, it might have just sealed Lee’s place as the region’s most important poet.

Feedback: [email protected] or follow him on Twitter@glenvilleashby
Collected Poems (1975-2105) by John Robert Lee (c)2018, Pp: 180
Publisher: Peepal Tree Press
ISBN 13: 9781845233518
www.peepaltreepress.com
Available at Amazon
Ratings: Highly recommended

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