St. Lucia’s Top Poets

I’m not sure of whether it’s because of the Walcott influence, or the island’s mix of French and English, or its astonishing beauty, but St. Lucia seems to be a land of poets. One gets the impression that every other St. Lucian is a poet. St. Lucians Derek Walcott, Canisia Lubrin (St. Lucian Canadian), Vladimir Lucien, Kendel Hippolyte, and Jane King have all won international awards for poetry, but I’m not aware of any St. Lucian who has won an international literary award for a non-poetry genre. And of the nine St. Lucian authors published by Peepal Tree Press, all but three are poets.

One suspects that outside of the literati and cultural elite, St. Lucians may not be fully aware of the regional and world prominence of their poets. For that matter, up to a few weeks ago, Dr. Anderson Reynolds said that at one of his impromptu book signings, a few St. Lucians were surprised to learn that there were St. Lucian authors, more so there were those with multiple titles under their belts. And on other occasions, St. Lucians would walk up to him and ask, “Are you the writer?” giving him the surreal impression that he was the only author on island. This despite the island’s annual month-long Nobel Laureate Festival celebrating the literary and intellectual feats of two of its favorite and greatest sons—Sir Arthur Lewis and Sir Derek Walcott—both of whom were prodigious writers.

Therefore, I think it’s time the populace meets St. Lucia’s top-ranked poets, those ensuring that, beginning with the Walcott Brothers and novelist Garth St. Omer, the island continues to carve and secure its space in world literature.

The criteria for making the list of our top poets include a combination of (1) receipt of national and international awards; (2) recognition or consensus among the St. Lucian literati of who are the best poets; (3) publications in literary journals or magazines, which arguably is the highest test of poetic veracity; and, of course, (4) sheer volume of output. With this preamble out of the way, we present St. Lucia’s top poets.

Derek Walcott
With no less than 24 collections of poetry, 14 international awards and honors, including the Nobel Prize and the OCM Bocas Prize, the English-speaking Caribbean preeminent literary prize, Walcott stands supreme not just among St. Lucia and Caribbean poets, but among world poets through time.

Canisia Lubrin
St. Lucian-Canadian, Canisia Lubrin, is only 38 years old and has just two collections of poems under her belt, yet she has taken the literary world by storm and has catapulted to the top ranking of St. Lucian poets. Her first collection of poems, Voodoo Hypothesis, which was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award, the Pat Lowther Award and was a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award, was named one of 2017’s best books in Canadian poetry by CBC Books and one of the ten ‘must-read’ books of 2017 by the League of Canadian Poets. Her second collection, The Dyzgraphxst, garnered even more praise and honors. It was shortlisted for four book prizes and won four awards, including the overall OCM Bocas Prize, the Derek Walcott Prize, and the Griffin Poetry Prize. More significantly, on the strength of these two poetry collections, Lubrin was one of two winners of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in poetry, which is open to English language writers from anywhere in the world, and, with winner cash prizes of US$165,000, is among the richest literary prize in the world.

Kendel Hippolyte
Before Canisia Lubrin made her poetic presence felt, Kendel Hippolyte was regarded as St. Lucia’s leading poet after Walcott. The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry once described him as “perhaps the outstanding Caribbean poet of his generation.” In terms of the ranking criteria mentioned in the introduction — international awards, peer recognition, literary magazine/journal publications, and poetic output—he is well covered. He has published seven books of poetry and his poems have appeared in such literary journals as The Greenfield Review, The Massachusetts Review, and The Review, and in anthologies like Caribbean Poetry Now, Voiceprint, and West Indian Poetry. He is a recipient of the St. Lucia Medal of Merit (Gold), and the Bridget Jones Travel Award. His poetry collection, Fault Lines, won the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for poetry. Indeed, by virtue of recognition, stature, and artistic discipline, Kendel Hippolyte may be regarded as the reigning crown prince of St. Lucian poetry.

John Robert Lee
Like Kendel Hippolyte, John Robert Lee has long been regarded as one of St. Lucia’s top poets. Derek Walcott praised him as “a scrupulous poet.” Over the years, he has published several books of poetry, however many of his poems before 2015 were reissued in the collections elemental (2008) and Collected Poems 1975-2015 (2017); and his more recent poems were presented in his latest collection, Pierrot (2020). Lee’s poems have appeared in a number of international anthologies and periodicals including The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse, The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse, Poetry Wales, Small Axe, and The Missing Slate. Lee has been described as “the foremost Caribbean Christian writer of his generation.” But although well-meaning, relegating him to being a Christian writer or poet may be doing him a disfavor and discounting his poetry, yet his poems are of similar (or of greater) breath and thematic complexity as that of his peers.

Vladimir Lucien
Thirty-Four-year-old Vladimir Lucien is the youngest of our top poets. With only one collection of poetry—Sounding Ground (2014)—under his belt, he falls short (in terms of poetic output) of the other candidates; however, in other regards, he stands tall. His work has appeared in such publications as Small Axe, Wasafiri, BIM, The Caribbean Review of Books, Caribbean Beat, Washington Square Review, and the anthology Beyond Sangre Grande. Sounding Ground won the Small Axe poetry prize, was shortlisted for the Guyana Prize for Caribbean Literature, and was the overall winner of the 2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, beating out the Man Booker Prize winner, A Brief History of Seven Killings, and Olive Senior’s Dying to Better Themselves, and making Vladimir Lucien the youngest ever winner of the prize, and at the time joining Derek Walcott as the only two St. Lucians to have won the overall prize (of course now with Lubrin there are three). In 2016, Lucien served as Writer-in-Residence at the University of the West Indies Mona Campus. Interestingly, given his capture of the overall Bocas Prize, and the praise critics have heaped upon him, Vladimir Lucien may well be the St. Lucian poet who will come closest to mirroring Walcott, and not the usual suspects of Hippolyte, Lee, and Dixon, who comprised the generation of St. Lucian writers immediately following that of Walcott and whom many saw as walking in his footsteps.

Jane King
Jane King Hippolyte, is another of St. Lucia’s iconic second-generation poets (with Walcott as the first generation). Now, being unassuming and preferring to tread softly, she may not attract as much overt attention as some of her fellow authors, but in terms of quality (if not quantity) and international acclaim, she is more than holding her own. She is the author of three collections of poetry—Into the Centre (1993), Fellow Traveller (1994), and Performance Anxiety (2013). She is a recipient of the Witter Bynner and James Michener creative writing fellowships. Fellow Traveller won the James Rodway Memorial Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the Canada and Caribbean region. Above, we said that Kendel Hippolyte, who is Jane King’s husband, may be regarded as the crown prince of St. Lucian poetry. If so, on her own merits Jane King is clearly the crown princess.

McDonald Dixon
Like Hippolyte, Lee, and King, the name McDonald Dixon is synonymous with St. Lucian poetry, and of all these iconic poets his style seems to come closest to that of Walcott, and/or maybe on him Walcott made the greatest impression. Although in recent years Dixon has shifted towards writing novels, of which he has four, the latest being the crime mystery novel A Scream in the Shadows, he has published several volumes of poetry. However, his earlier poems/collections were compiled in Collected Poems 1961-2000, and his more recent poems were published as Aux Lyons and other poems (2011) and Beloved country and other poems (2013). Dixon is well respected among his peers. His work has appeared in such magazines and anthologies as Agenda, Bim magazine, Callaloo, Caribbean Quarterly, Caribbean Writer and Wasafari. He is the recipient of the Cultural Development Foundation (CDF) Lifetime Achievement Award, and the St. Lucia National Medal of Merit for his contributions to literature and photography. An anthology of poems—Sent Lisi: Poems and Art of Saint Lucia—was published in his honor on his 70th birthday.

Adrian Augier
Adrian Augier is another second-generation iconic St. Lucian poet who came up in the shadow of Derek Walcott. He has published no less than six collections of poetry, namely Out of Darkness (1979), Genesis (1980), Of Many Voices (1981), Tears & Triumphs (1982), BridgeMaker (2001), and Navel String (2012). Augier has received several regional/international awards and honors, not exclusively for his poetry, but for his involvement in economic development and for art in general. For example, the University of the West Indies bestowed upon him an honorary doctorate in recognition of his contribution to regional development and culture, the ANSA awarded him the 2010 Caribbean Laureate for Arts and Letters, and in 2009 he received the NDATT Caribbean Cacique Award for his contribution to the development and integration of Caribbean Theatre. Adrian Augier was the only one of our top poets who made the list of St. Lucia’s top public intellectuals.

Modeste Downes

Of the poets who made our list, Canisia Lubrin and Modeste Downes were the only ones who grew up outside Castries. Lubrin spent her early childhood in the Roseau Valley and immigrated to Canada at the age of nine. Downes, on the other hand, was born and raised in the Vieux Fort area and is among a small cohort of writers who are giving rise to a distinguished body of southern literature that is among the best of what the island has to offer. Downes have published three books of poetry—Phases (2005), Theatre of the Mind (2012), and A Lesson on Wings (2019)—but the numbers could be deceiving, for his collections range from 55 to 197 poems and from 102 to 198 pages, which is more voluminous than the typical poetry collection. Downes’ poetry has attracted much praise and recognition from his peers, and, like most of the other top St. Lucian poets, he has won several national poetry awards, but he falls short regarding international acclaim in that he has neither won international awards nor, as far as we know, his poetry has appeared in recognized literary publications.

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