GREAT BAY, St. Martin —The new book, Ixion & The Soufrière Suite by Shake Keane, will launch at the University of St. Martin on Friday, February 28, at 7:30 pm.
“This 70th-anniversary edition of two poetry books by Shake Keane, the legendary poet and jazz musician from St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG), is published in St. Martin by House of Nehesi Publishers,” said Shujah Reiph.
The program is free to the public and will feature performances of Keane’s poems from Ixion by Lasana Sekou, a well-traveled poet, as well as and the fantastic singer and brilliant choreographer Clara Reyes,” said Reiph.
“The book launch is the closing highlight of the month-long 34th annual Black History Celebration,” added Reiph, president of the Conscious Lyrics Foundation (CLF). CLF organizes the February celebration, which features the island’s longest-running lecture series.
“The book launch is a collaboration between HNP and CLF, along with USM and SOS Radio 95.9 FM,” said Sekou, who is also the projects director of the indie press. Ixion will be introduced through a critical review by Fabian Adekunle Badejo, a literary critic, journalist, and author.
The slim anthology has already been studied by Philip Nanton of the University of The West in Barbados. “The collections have in common the poetic representation of upheaval and turbulence of different types,” said Nanton.
“The two poetry sequences in Ixion & The Soufrière Suite show the extent to which Shake Keane was a precursor of today’s heightened ecological awareness,” said Nanton.
Shake Keane was born in St. Vincent in 1927. Before his fame in international jazz circles while living in England in the 1950s and 1960s, Keane’s first two poetry books were published in the Caribbean region in the early 1950s.
In 1972, Keane, who had played music with the likes of Lord Kitchener, the Joe Harriot Quintet, and Kurt Edelhagen, was back in the region, reciting his poetry at the first Caribbean Festival of the Arts in Guyana.
In 1979, SVG gained its independence, the country’s Soufrière volcano erupted, and Keane’s response to the devastation was The Volcano Suite—a series of five poems. That year, he won Cuba’s prestigious Casa de las Americas prize for poetry with One a Week with Water.
In 1981, he emigrated to the USA, a self-imposed exile in Brooklyn, New York. In 1991, a unique CD of his music, Real Keen: Reggae into Jazz, was released in London. Well known for his iconoclastic poetry and regarded as one of the pioneering fathers of modern Caribbean literature, Keane died in Norway in 1997 while on a jazz tour, according to his publisher.
His poetry has appeared in Bim, Kyk-over-al, Savacou, and Caribbean Quarterly. Keane’s work is anthologized in The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse; Disaster Matters: Disasters Matter; and The Angel Horn—Shake Keane (1927-1997) Collected Poems.
