Edward Lucie-Smith was born in Kingston, Jamaica, moving to the United Kingdom in 1946. He was educated at The King’s School, Canterbury, and, after a little time in Paris, he read History at Merton College, Oxford from 1951 to 1954. He is a well-known poet, biographer and writer on the visual arts. He has written more than sixty books about art, including Latin American Art of the 20th Century, American Realism and Sexuality in Western Art.
A poetic voice out of the geography. Described in Western culture, of course, but also fueled by interculturality, not on the semantic ground, but on the social and existential level, certainly.
LOVE AND LIKING
Liking is this strange thing.
You can’t force it.
You can’t make ‘ought’ marry ‘liking’.
It does not recognize duty.
Love is easier,
Maybe,
More tractable,
Willing to be summoned.
Liking is a deer
That hides in a thicket,
But when it comes out to graze,
It is flesh and blood
And does not vanish.
Love blows away like smoke,
Runs like water.
Goes.
ONE BREATH
Great castles in the air
Filled up with gilded halls,
With mighty statues there
And pictures on the walls.
We build them from belief.
These images that stare
Are guardians against grief.
They are not always there –
One breath, the castle falls.
THE CAPTAIN
Or – My Father
Bald centaur,
Sperm-donor,
Polo was your passion.
Your study smelled
Of cigarettes
And embrocation.
Soon after you died
I found in a back corridor
A bookcase crammed
With tales of the Great War.
You were gassed.
You survived.
You lived your real life
Before I knew you.
YES
The birds and the fish
Don’t mean much to me
Except as things
I might occasionally
Want to eat.
The supposed paradise
I spent my
Formative years in
Has faded from memory
And lost its glow.
Oh, but the city! The city!
The infinitely multiple
Human species!
New forms emerging
Every day.
In old age
I walk out,
Renewing myself.
How sad,
How good
That this will continue
Long after…
Yes, long, long after.
Yes.
NOT LISTENING
You’re outside in the hallway
Shuffling letters and papers,
Making a noise
Like a mouse in the wainscot.
You want us to know
You are there,
Not listening.
You want us to know
You might be listening.
Your resentment
Seeps through the door-crack
Like a thin plume
Of acridsmoke.
