Poetry Review
Canticles II (MMXIX)
by George Elliott Clarke
Guernica Editions,
2019. 505 pp.
ISBN 978-1-77183-409-4
In a 2022 text, George Elliott Clarke calls his Canticles series “an expected six-volume epic…that begins with the survey of two millennia of oppressive history”. The two hefty volumes of Canticles I (2016 and 2017) brought this revisionary history of the world up to Mao’s 1949 victory in China. And still the subject called the poet to a powerful and witty addendum, War Canticles (Vallum Chapbook Series No. 34): “I would like the reader to appreciate the gravity of the oppressions that humanitarians and civil libertarians continue to protest.”
In the 2019 preface to Canticles II (MMXIX), the volume under review here, Clarke refers to the six-volume project as his “lyric epic, wherein documents and personages are set in narrative contestation (disputation) with each other” (p. xiv). This volume is the first part of Canticles II; the second part, Canticles II (MMXX), appeared in 2020. Thus, the whole lyric epic—if indeed it keeps to just six parts!—has reached the two-thirds mark. I think we can now make out its overall shape, but we can also expect surprise.
Clarke’s poetry possesses in abundance the greatest quality of art and poetry, surprise—freshness, continuous invention, change within unity, adventure on the way to a goal. With the large controlling project and shape of Canticles, he has given himself a grand field for his ability to join far-flung elements from his stores: experience, rhythmic and phrase-making power, grasp of tone and diction and verbal music, knowledge of history, language, society and philosophy. The at-first-glance sprawling work has a distinct purpose and plan in its each part. As mentioned, the first two volumes review man’s inhumanity to man down to 1949. Simultaneously their revision of world history restores and exalts the role of Africa and Africans. The excoriation of social injustice and cruelty is not merely a cry from victims but more centrally a song of pride, joy in life, exultancy in one’s own genius.
A second and related theme sounds throughout not only the first two volumes, but all four to date. This is Clarke’s vision of the universal poetic genius and its thrust for freedom, always alive if often seemingly defeated. Key to this is his insight that the universal poetic genius is one with the soul of Africa, with African cultural achievement, which represents in unique and necessary ways the human thrust for “love, freedom, poetry” (as the Surrealists put it). And while we’re speaking of love, it’s necessary to add a third great theme, the exaltation of bodily, sexual love and its ever-creative linkage to purity, to health of self and culture, to spirituality and to poetry. Finally, Clarke adds a fifth crucial element to these others: the constant dynamism of his style. Accompanying the revision of world history, and the special role of Africa in heroically preserving creativity and joy, and the central role of love, The style is a concrete example of the historical themes, and it is love and sex transformed into words and receiving back from words a still further depth, intensification, purification. This aspect of the Canticles make me think of the highly detailed, sensuously rich and various, yet always politically informed poetry that has originated from the Caribbean, where some of Clarke’s ancestry lies: Derek Walcott, Dionne Brand, and Lorna Goodison, to name a few.
The fusion of these elements makes the evolving poem a treasure house. A reader tempted to dread their size will soon find himself/herself immersed in pleasures and revelations. It’s also the case that the whole immense poem will reveal itself as something that invites continual returns to savour it in parts, the way one enters and admires a great cathedral, knowing that each trip is incomplete, and enjoys only parts of the whole building—yet parts that reflect the whole.
A tiny sample of Canticles II (MMXIX) will have to stand for this whole stylistic world. Fortunately, there are many samples in which Clarke’s ever-unified vision shines whole through one of its aspects. On p. 232, he has a poem that combines the themes of poetry, a Blakean insight into the role of jealousy in spoiling society, and the relationship of the delights of love to the delights of style—and the delights of holiness, conceived with a typical Clarkean relish: “Hungry to snatch at lost Delights / Decrepitude snarls at Youth. // But Youth’s wild ejaculations narrow / to Maturity’s piddly whining. / Supreme Style is Simplicity: / To a man a woman, to husband a wife— / to slice and swallow salmon, cheese, pears— / to be as innocent and rustic as Adam, / the first poet. // To have Poetry open your mouth. // To enjoy exquisite exacerbation / of Ecstasy. / The consequence of Poetry. // (Even if everybody else hates poets, / God don’t.” (And after that well-simmered mixture of exultation, philosophy, sociological myth-making, sensual and sensuous imagery, and credal statement, the poem takes another surprising turn.)
To come back to the Canticles as a whole: just as the two volumes of Canticles I are a revisionary world history, the two volumes of Canticles II start over again and review humankind’s religious history in the form of revised versions of various scriptures—transgressive or effervescently irreverent at times, always venturing into spiritual/bodily insights. Canticles II (MMXIX) engages the Bible. Its vastness provides a field day for the creative-critical play of the loving reader. For me, it is a highway running from the early take on Exodus and the true nature of God, “I’m the God that delivers slaves from Bondage. / Ain’t no others!” (p. 56), to the late affirmation of poetry, defiance, and freedom, “One must be a total poet… // Understand that mind is a compass: / Its four stops are Sex, Health, Capital, and Death. // In response, / wield a vinegar pen and/or a honey stylus” (p. 455).
The big surprise still in store for us, from the whole work, alongside the poems’ many individual surprises, is: what will be the subject of volumes 5 and 6, to match the world history of 1 and 2, the world religion of 2 and 3? Whatever emerges, Canticles is already one of the great poetic projects currently underway in English-language poetry, comparable in its very different way to—for instance—the mu poems of Nathaniel Mackey (whom Clarke may have encountered personally when he was teaching at Duke University). I think also of Jay Wright’s Transfigurations. But Clarke’s deeply informed, intellectual, rambunctious, satirical and beneficent vision and voice are all his own—rueful and angry, celebratory and prophetic: “The millionaire fattens on pastries; / the toiler diets on dew.” To order your signed copy, send $35 (postage is included) to George Elliott Clarke, 3003 Danforth Ave., P.O. Box 93715, Toronto, Ontario M4C 5R5.
