Sounding Ground

Vladimir Lucien is a young poet with so many gifts. His poetry is intelligent, musical, gritty in observation, graceful in method. You can see a young man building his house of poetry, just as his poems reflect on building a marriage and making his home, and all the accommodations that this demands. The world where he builds his house is St Lucia, itself an island that reflects the intra-regional migrancy of Caribbean people, with ancestral connections to Barbados, Antigua and Trinidad. He builds his house with stories of ancestors, immediate family, the history embedded in his language choices as a St Lucian writer, and heroes such as Walter Rodney, CLR James, Kamau Brathwaite and a local steelbandsman. His poems are never overtly political, but there's an oblique and often witty politics embedded in the poems, as where observing the rise of a grandfather out of rural poverty into the style of colonial respectability, he writes of the man "who eat his farine and fish/and avocado in a civilize fight between/knife and fork and etiquette on his plate".

His poems tell truths, creating and questioning their own mythologies, as in a poem about his mother who "liked to look for relatives/ to find blood where there was only water." This is a collection that is alive with its conscious tensions both in subject matter and form. There's a tension between the vision of ancestors, family and of the poet himself as being engaged in the business of acting in the world and building on the past, and a sharp awareness of the inescapability of age's frailty, the decay of memory and of death. In the music of the poems themselves, there's an enlivening counterpoint between the natural rhythms of creole speech and the metric organisation of the line and its patterns of sound.