Belmont Portfolio

This is a magnificent and varied collection in which the observational, the sacramental, the elegiac, the prophetic and the personal mesh together. The suite of title poems records a time spent on his own in the unfamiliar streets of Belmont in Trinidad that catch the sense of being on the edge of adventure and moments of epiphany in seeing the numinous behind the ordinary. The ‘Office Hours’ suite, with gracious nods to W.H. Auden, is both an engagement with the hours of divine office and the Bible readings that go with it, and a very human series of reflections on that most universal of experiences – how we live through the cycles of our days. The rousing, Old Testament prophetic, righteous anger of the ‘Watchman’ sequence reflects on the hell of living in Babylon and the gap between the deceits of ‘liberal democracies’ and the ghastly realities of their global crimes. In the last sequence, ‘What Remains to be Said’, the poet emerges to the front of the stage and speaks confidentially to the reader, reflecting on what must be treasured as sustenance through ‘this Purgatorio’ of our times, and wondering how one can speak in an era where you are ‘collared in faith in agnostic seasons’, where the too frequent news of the deaths of those with whom you have shared the struggle is a ‘haunting against my faith in the Tree of Life’ – and questioning, slightly tongue-in-cheek, ‘approaching mid-seventies, what do I know?’

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