From the CRB archive: poems by Jane King

by Nicholas Laughlin on July 25, 2010

View of St Lucia, by Mike Werner

View of St Lucia from the sea. Photograph by Mike Werner, posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

While the CRB publishes new reviews and other material (almost) every week, we’re also slowly transferring the contents of all our back issues to our new online archive. (It’s going to take us a few months longer — we’re talking about several hundred reviews, essays, poems, stories, interviews, etc.) This is a rich resource for anyone interested in recent Caribbean literature and culture, and we’re quite proud of it. Starting today, Antilles will feature a regular Sunday series looking back at some of our favourite pieces from the CRB archive.

In our May 2005 issue we published two poems — “St Joseph at the Music School” and “A Turtle Like Zeus” — by the St Lucian poet Jane King. Both are meditations on mortality (human and reptile), delicately playing the whimsical against the wistful:

The wind sussurating the shak-shak trees
almost drowning the sounds of the sea
and the children performing for teachers
in the building behind me.
My small son suffers his lesson
silently . . .

You can read both poems here, and find more poems from the CRB archive via our subject index.

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