Belmont Portfolio - John Robert Lee

This is a magnificent and varied collection in which the observational, the sacramental, the elegiac, the prophetic and the personal mesh together. The suite of title poems records a time spent on his own in the unfamiliar streets of Belmont in Trinidad that catch the sense of being on the edge of adventure and moments of epiphany in seeing the numinous behind the ordinary. The ‘ Office Hours’ suite, with gracious nods to W.H. Auden, is both an engagement with the hours of divine office and the Bible readings that go with it, and a very human series of reflections on that most universal of experiences – how we live through the cycles of our days.