Sounding Ground

by Vladimir Lucien

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. 

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2014

Reviews

[O · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just a thought, I enjoy poetry that capture moments of time, nothing broad and overarching, just very intimate, and these were exactly like that.

[Katharina Boekhorst · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection was phenomenal, absolutely worth it. Need to get a physical copy

[Rol-J Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

I took a bold move in purchasing this book because I am trying to read works that have won prizes at the Bocas Lit Fest, and I was by no means disappointed. This work was truly deserving of winning the 2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Literature. It is multi-layered, culturally rich and relevant, bold, beautifully written, and well-compiled. In many ways this is an autobiographical anthology of poems as much as it is a tribute to revolutionaries of the Caribbean: Walter Rodney and CLR James. There are poems that touch on poverty and how families in St Lucia manage their socio-economic conditions by immersing themselves in folklore and essentially making the best of life as it is presented, and as it has been past down through generations hurt and broken by slavery and colonialism.

I definitely recommend this for reading, over and over again.

[Camille Dungy]

Vladimir Lucien’s keen observations draw on sound, song, sorrow, survival strategies, and the full scope of the lives and landscapes surrounding his poem’s subjects. One poem demands that readers “look to the hills,” while another describes “ears that hear the soft voices of fruit/ and find their humility/ in small unassuming seeds.” One of my favorites, an elegy composed at the grave of the great writer and thinker C.L.R. James, begins: “The epitaph is slightly faded/ as though the rains had stopped/ for a moment inside his name and cried.” Lucien is also a screenwriter, documentarian, critic, and Ph.D. candidate. It’s no wonder he’s able to live all these roles. The wide-reaching intelligence at the center of Sounding Ground holds many consciousnesses—human and greater-than-human, living and ancestral, and still yet to be born.

Review published originally with Orion Magazine: https://orionmagazine.org/article/14-...

[Apphia Barton · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

Obeah, beautiful island life, family, relationships, love, horn, youth, boyhood, masculinity, tradition, spirituality and did I say Obeah? An accessible, well-written, thoroughly engaging collection of poems that touch on the livelihood and character of St. Lucia and to certain extent, Trinidad.

[Sofia Bagdade · Rating 5 out of 5]

Electrified. Loved the repeated imagery of dominoes and mother’s arms and calling out to something greater. Gift from Joey🥰🥰