Claude Wilkinson

Claude Wilkinson is a poet, painter, and writer, who has just published his fifth poetry collection: Soon Done with the Crosses (2023). It is the latest volume from Cascade’s Poiema Poetry Series. I am honoured to have worked with Claude as his editor for this new book.

His previous poetry collections include Reading the Earth (1998, Michigan State), winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award ― Joy in the Morning (2004, LSU Press), for which he was nominated for an American Book Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a Pulitzer Prize ― Marvelous Light (2018, Stephen F. Austin State University Press) ― and World Without End (2020, Slant). He is also the winner of the Whiting Award for Poetry.

He grew up in rural Mississippi, but has been influenced by many other regions and landscapes. In a recent interview with Fare Forward he said, “[M]y way of looking through our world is, without doubt, shaped by my early, enjoyable experiences in a rural, welcoming landscape. I believe it’s one of the ways that my spirit became attuned to God and what little I know of the universe.” Later, when asked about challenges for writing about nature today, he said, “To properly appreciate nature, we must have reverence for it and foremost for its Creator.”

Wilkinson identifies his favourite poets as Derek Walcott and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Robert Cording has said that Claude Wilkinson’s poetry “brings art and nature together—the artfulness here not in its faithful copying of nature, but in its evocation of reality in all its fullness.”

The following is the opening poem in Soon Done with the Crosses.

Birds That Alight on Faith

Help me also to believe in
the leanest saplings and twigs,
in something as flimsy
as a honeysuckle bloom,
as Theseus did, in my imagining, when
he tackled the Minotaur, or Icarus
when he flew momentarily
into the face of the sun.

Help in the way I’ve seen
pelicans and swans skim
mutely onto a lake,
thinking it solid as stone,
the way Saint Peter did
when he took his first steps
on stormy Gennesaret
before hearing the strife
cursing around his feet.

With only that thimbleful
of aerial surety, help me
to grasp those things
which never collapse
under the heft of this life.

Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

John Robert Lee*

John Robert Lee is one of the significant younger St. Lucian contemporaries of the late Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. Lee’s most recent collection, Pierrot (2020, Peeple Tree) marks his seventieth year, and shares his reflections on his life’s journey and the departures into death of both friends and cultural heroes.

The Pierrot figure, according to his publisher’s website, is “the sad clown, holy fool of literary tradition, the suffering artist who connects to Christ in his most human incarnation as Man of Sorrows, and he is also the Pierrot Grenade of Caribbean carnival…Sometimes Pierrot is an archetypal figure, sometimes he may be thought to be Lee himself.”

In a recent interview Lee stated, “You know, I am actually a Baptist elder and pastor in my church, a practicing Christian, for over forty years.” In his younger days, he says, he walked with Rastafari, but that he left them for religious reasons.

The following is from The Passion and Resurrection Canticles.

Gethsemani

What commenced in the other garden begins to end here,
in the shadow of an olive mill by a black brook.

“Behold, We have become like one of them, to bear
their sorrows and their griefs.” Let the wheel break
this Fruit on every tooth and tread. Bruise
the Seed under the trampling heel of the Bull
of Bashan. Pour the sweating barrel
of this agony into the cupping palms of God.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about John Robert Lee: first post.

Another John Robert Lee poem was recently posted at Poems For Ephesians.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

Les Murray*

Les Murray (1938—2019) is considered the leading Australian poet of his generation. His most-recent poetry collection, Waiting for the Past, won the Judith Wright Calanthe Award at the 2015 Queensland Literary Awards. This is just one more in a series of honours Les Murray has received, such as having Queen Elizabeth II present him with the Gold Medal for Poetry at Buckingham Palace in 1999. He died last Monday — April 29th — at age 80.

The late Derek Walcott once wrote of Murray’s poetry, “There is no poetry in the English language now so rooted in its sacredness, so broad-leafed in its pleasures, and yet so intimate and conversational.”

Murray is one of the poets featured in my anthology The Turning Aside: The Kingdom Poets Book of Contemporary Christian Poetry — (available here) and through Amazon. He was very generous in helping me to obtain the various rights to use his poetry within various jurisdictions around the globe.

The following poem is from Waiting for the Past and first appeared in First Things.

Jesus Was A Healer

Jesus was a healer
never turned a patient down

never charged coin or conversion
started off with dust and spittle

then re-tuned lives to pattern
simply by his attention

often surprised himself a little
by his unbounded ability

Jesus was a healer
reattached his captor’s ear

opened senses, unjammed cripples
sent pigs to drown delirium

cured a shy tug at his hem
learned to transmit resurrection

could have stood more Thank You
for God’s sake, which was his own

Jesus was a healer
keep this quiet, he would mutter

to his learners. Copy me
and they did to a degree

still depicted on church walls
cure without treatment or rehearsals.

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about Les Murray: first post, second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection is Ampersand (2018, Cascade). His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock, including the anthologies The Turning Aside, and Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.

Jane King

Jane King is a Saint Lucian poet, actor and theatre director. Her poetry collections include, Fellow Traveller which won the James Rodway Memorial Prize (awarded to her by Derek Walcott) and most-recently Performance Anxiety: New and Selected Poems (Peeple Tree, 2013). Her husband is the poet and playwright Kendal Hippolyte.

She is a Dean and senior lecturer in English at the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College in St Lucia. She has served as a judge and chairperson for the Commonwealth Writers Prize. She is also the founding director of Lighthouse Theatre Company in St Lucia.

Performers are Holy 2

It used to bother me when they said that God
made us to know him, love him and serve him.
It made our creation seem something of a whim
and it was difficult as a child to be overawed
by the concept of a being who needed so much laud.
A bit like the he-made-us-in-his-own-image thing
which seemed to justify so much bad seeing
because we all have somewhere a great need to be adored.

But walking down a brash Manhattan street one day
it occurred to me that the whole world is really a play.
God's into theatre, making all the scenes, casting
the roles, doing sets, lighting, costumes, in a lasting
whole. He needs us as an audience, needs comments from us.
Lord, I'm sorry that I was too slow. You are to be adored.

Posted with permission of the poet. Thanks to Burl Horniachek for suggesting this, and several other poets.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.

John Robert Lee

John Robert Lee, of St. Lucia, is a well-established poet whose writing has been anthologized in such books as The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse, and The Faber Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories. His collected poems, Elemental, appeared in the UK from Peepal Tree Press in 2008.

He has been involved in theatre as both an actor and a director — has expressed his faith as a preacher, writer and broadcaster — has worked as a professional librarian, and in radio and television as a broadcaster and producer.

Fellow St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott (who won the Nobel Prize in 1992) called John Robert Lee “a scrupulous poet"; he continued, “it’s not a common virtue in poets, to be scrupulous and modest in the best sense, not to over-extend 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.”

The following comes from his chapbook Canticles (2007):

Canticle XXXI

---------It is clear she was beguiled by the Serpent’s sinuous
-----flatteries.
-----------But he, was he — seduced by her full-curving softnesses,
------------------------------allured by those flittering
---------lashes — tripped into the parting chasms of her sweet
-----flirtatious
----------------mouth? (So says the old poet.) Or, eavesdropping,
Curious Man, did he wonder about the Crystal Gate, the proffered
-----dominion,
-------------the deadly enticements of wisdom? Whichever, flouting
-------------the order he chose.
-----------------------------Just one more query — those tunics of
-----covering skin,
--------were those the first-born lambs they had loved above all
-----others?

(Posted with permission of the poet)

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about John Robert Lee: second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca