Sounding Ground

By Vladimir Lucien

Winner of:
2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature

Vladimir Lucien is a young poet with so many gifts; his poetry is intelligent, musical, gritty in observation, graceful in method. His poems contain stories of ancestors, immediate family, the history embedded in his language choices as a St Lucian writer, and heroes such as Walter Rodney, C. L. R. James, Kamau Brathwaite, and a local steelbandsman. Although never overtly political, 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." 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1845232399
• ISBN13: 9781845232399
• Release Date: July 2014
• Publisher: Peepal Tree Press
• Length: 64 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.2" x 8.0"