Canticles

Author / Creator

Clarke, George Elliott, author

Available as

Physical

Summary

Canticles is a lyric-styled epic. Book I (part 1-2) of The Canticles puts into dialogue -- as dramatic monologues -- those who fostered the transatlantic slave trade, or who demonized the image of ...

Canticles is a lyric-styled epic. Book I (part 1-2) of The Canticles puts into dialogue -- as dramatic monologues -- those who fostered the transatlantic slave trade, or who demonized the image of the Negro in the Occident; as well as those who struggled for liberation and/or anti-racism. In this work, Dante can critique Christopher Columbus and Frederick Douglass can upbraid Abraham Lincoln; Elizabeth Barrett Browning can muse on her African racial heritage and its implications for child-bearing, while Karl Marx can excoriate Queen Victoria. The second book or testament -- Canticles II, part 1 (MMXIX) and Canticles II, part 2 (MMXX) -- issues re-readings (revisions, rewrites) of scriptures crucial to the emergent (Anglophone) African Diaspora in the Americas. Canticles II forms the second part of the trilogy, being properly irreverent where necessary, but never blasphemous. It is scripture become what it always is, really, anyway: Poetry. In Canticles III (MMXXII) and (MMXXIII), Clarke shifts focus -- from world history and theology -- to the specific history and bios associated with the creation of the African ("Africadian") Baptist Association of Nova Scotia. By so doing, he concludes the most remarkable epic ever essayed in Canadian letters -- an amalgam of Pound and Walcott-- but entirely and inimitably his own.--

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