Canticles III (MMXXII)

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 focus--from 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