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.
Vladimir Lucien was born in St. Lucia on March 16th 1988. While attending St. Mary’s College Lucien stumbled upon his ‘first art’: acting, starring in a number of plays produced by the school’s drama club. After leaving school, Lucien took up a teaching job, which he resigned from after a year to pursue acting in New York. When this proved discouraging, Lucien returned to St. Lucia shortly in 2008, and subsequently took up studies at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad where he began writing poetry seriously.