Canticles III

In Zanzibar, in 2008, George Elliott Clarke began to write his "Canticles," an epic poem treating the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Imperial and colonial conquest, and the resistance to all these evils. That is the subject of Canticles I (MMXVI) and (MMXVII). In Canticles II (MMXIX) and (MMXX), Clarke rewrites significant scriptures from an oral and "African" or "Africadian" perspective. Now, in Canticles III (MMXXII) and (MMXXIII), Clarke shifts focusfrom 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.