John Robert Lee

John Robert Lee (born 1948) is a Saint Lucian Christian poet, writer, journalist and librarian. He has been awarded the Saint Lucia Medal of Merit (Gold) for his contribution to the development of Saint Lucian arts and culture. In 2017, his Collected Poems (1975–2015) were published by Peepal Tree Press.

Life

John Robert Lee was born in Saint Lucia in 1948. The son of an Anglican father and a Catholic mother, he attended Anglican schools and a Catholic church as a child. From 1960 to 1967, he attended Saint Mary's College. Leaving the school after Sixth Form, he worked at the Royal Bank of Canada. During this time he became connected with the St. Lucia Arts Guild, a theatre company established in the years after the Second World War by the Walcott brothers and their friends and dedicated to the exploration of Caribbean identity.

In 1969, he began studying a general arts degree at the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill in Barbados, which included English and French literature, language, history and sociology. In 1975, his first collection of poetry, Vocation, was published by the University of the West Indies' Extra Mural Department

He created MAHANAIM publishing, under which imprint he has published several books.

He has said that his poems of faith reflect a "sacramental" view, that seek to find and place the "sacred" and "divine" realities within earthly and worldly realities. For him the world around him, street and community life, nature and its seascapes, landscapes, fauna and flora, the culture of the Caribbean and his Saint Lucia become "metaphors of the metaphysical". His poems are not "tracts" but he strives to write good poetry that can stand alongside good poetry of any theme or culture.

Writing

Lee published his first poems in 1970 in Link magazine, a Saint Lucian literary journal. In 1975, he published his first collection of poetry Vocation & other poems (U.W.I. Extra Mural Department, 1975). He has since published many volumes of poetry, including Artefacts: collected poems (Mayers, 2000), Canticles (Mahanaim Publishing, 2007), Elemental: new and selected poems (Peepal Tree Press, 2008) and SIGHTING and other poems of faith (Xlibris, 2013). In 2017, his Collected Poems (1975–2015) were published by Peepal Tree Press, as was his 2020 collection Pierrot.

Lee's poems have been published widely in international anthologies, including The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English (Penguin Classics, 2005), The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse (Oxford University Press, 2005), The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry (Heinemann, 1992) and World English Poetry (Bengal Publications, 2015). His poems have also appeared in publications such as Small Axe, Poetry Wales, Prairie Schooner, Re-Markings, and The Missing Slate, Interviewing the Caribbean, Small Axe Salon, PREE, and Almost Island.

He has had short stories published in The Faber Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories (Faber & Faber, 1990) and Facing the Sea (Heinemann,1986). with Kendel Hippolyte, Jane King, Vladimir Lucien, The Road to Mount Pleasant: selected essays on Saint Lucian culture in honour of Msgr. Patrick Anthony on his 70th birthday [with Embert Charles] (Castries: Folk Research Centre, 2017) and Saint Lucian Writers and Writing: An Author Index (Papillote Press, 2019). He presently curates a Caribbean Poetry Portfolio for Acalabash.com.

Speaking on his attitude to writing, Lee has said: "I use the guidelines of 'truth, beauty and harmony' to shape what I am doing. The words of Michael Mitchell [...] adapting Blake, sum up for me what I aim for: 'grounded in the real world, transformed by metaphor, cultivating empathy, having universal perspective.' I write scrupulously and with attention to detail and accuracy in my fiction and non-fiction (essays, reviews)."