SIGHTING and other poems of faith

About the Book

John Robert Lee has been described as “the foremost Caribbean Christian writer of his generation” with a “truly incarnational view of faith, anchored in the reality of human experience and expressed in richly textured images of Caribbean landscapes, dress, street life, music, dance and his native Creole language.” The selected poems in Sighting and other poems of faith mark the pilgrim’s progress of this writer over three decades. In the poems he sees his life and experiences through the lens of the Christian faith, yet, in the words of Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, his Saint Lucian contemporary, “you don’t get in the poetry anything that is, in a sense, preachy or self-advertising in terms of its morality.” His is a poetry that is rooted in the flesh and blood reality of his times, even as he looks beyond to the transcendent promises of his faith. St. Lucia, Boston, the Haitian earthquake of 2010 are the scenes to which he turns his perceptive gaze, with a poetry that is remarkably mature. The poetry is accessible to anyone who loves a craftsman who turns the language into startling and provocative images.

About the Author

John Robert Lee (b. 1948) has published several collections of poetry. Derek Walcott, Nobel laureate 1992, observes: “Robert Lee has been a scrupulous poet, that’s the biggest virtue that he has, and it’s not a common virtue in poets, to be scrupulous and modest in the best sense, not to overextend the range of the truth of his emotions, not to go for the grandiose. He is a Christian poet obviously. You don’t get in the poetry anything that is, in a sense, preachy or self-advertising in terms of its morality. He is a fine poet.” He lives in Saint Lucia.