John Robert Lee, Song & Symphony (2016)

“In Song and Symphony, the St. Lucian poet John Robert Lee engages in a creative dialogue with the paintings of the St. Lucian Shallon Fadlien: the result is a series of poems, which testify to John Robert Lee‘s longstanding interest in the visual arts (see the recent collection After Gary Butte, 2015), but also in music and in writing of a religious, spiritual nature like, for example, Canticles, 2007 and Sightings and Other Poems of Faith, 2013. Continuing the honest exploration of desire, which shaped some of his previous works (for instance, ‘A City Affair’ in City Remembrances, 2016), John Robert Lee here gives full rein to the imagination and, following Fadlien’s lead, he re-envisages the two figures in the paintings as St. Lucian versions of Paolo and Francesca, tossed about by the wind of passion in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Unlike the Dantean characters, however, the two figures are not stuck in Inferno, but firmly anchored in St. Lucia: tuning in to the music of what happens around them, they find themselves in a Purgatorio of ‘cynical academies, gossiping sidewalks, and wary pews’ but are nevertheless committed to maintain their belief in ‘the promise of Paradiso’ which is renewed in the ‘blossoming gardens’ and arcs-en-ciel of the island.”    —Maria Cristina Fumagalli for Caribbean Writers and Poets on Facebook

Listen to John Robert Lee read his poem, accompanied by the images of Shallon Fadlien and music by Charles Cadet in a Facebook video by Caribbean Writers and Poets in celebration of Caribbean Literature Day 2025. Posted July 11, 2025.