Looking for Cazabon by Lawrence Scott. London and Trafalgar: Papillote Press, 2025. ISBN: 978173930367. 85 pp. paperback.
Looking for Cazabon is a fine collection of poems: measured, beautifully crafted, quietly passionate, and often very moving. Lawrence Scott is, of course, well known as a fine novelist and short story writer, but this is his first full-length collection of poems. His interest in poetry as a medium is longstanding, though: a selection of his poems was included in the anthology Caribbean New Voices as long ago as 1995, and occasional poems have appeared over the years in journals like Wasafiri and Agenda. Looking for Cazabon is a much more sustained undertaking.
The collection was written, as the poet explains in his preface, during a period of three years he spent living back in Trinidad (after a childhood in Trinidad, he has lived in the UK for most of his adult life) while he was researching and writing his novel Light Falling on Bamboo. That book imagines and explores the life of the nineteenth-century Trinidadian painter Michael Jean Cazabon. Cazabon, whether he knew it or not, was making history in a very literal sense: his images would come to define future generations’ visualisations of that time and place. Scott’s poems, mostly sonnets, are not so much responses to particular paintings but are written almost incidentally as he tries to engage with Cazabon—his travels, his ways of seeing, his technical expertise, and the emotional struggles of one kind and another that inform the ways he regards the landscapes and the life that he is portraying. Scott’s poems draw, in words, a view of twenty-first century Trinidad informed by his engagement with Cazabon’s sensibility:
An oriole startles the dawn with gold,
a ground dove taking me into the brown shade.
The last of the parrots fly in. Screams unfold,
while shadows skim the pitch road and rough verges fade.
(From “Saddle Road”)
In subtle, unanticipated ways, the twenty-first-century writer comes to empathise with his nineteenth- century compatriot as he discovers crossovers between his own story and that of the painter:
…those mile posts on the heart’s journey
the beat of the ocean, the beat of the heart
The most direct evocation of Cazabon is in the sequence of seven sonnets that opens the collection, “After Cazabon: On the Road,” which imagines the painter at work in a landscape that—like the poet—he recalls but is now reseeing in the process of making art:
The foreday morning broke through the sea-mist
in the distance beyond Saut d’Eau Island.
It was just him and his brushes, the bush ticking,
the engine of the cigale screaming in staccatos,
(iv)
……………
Michel Jean worked, forgetting where he was,
as in each painting he reclaimed his home.
I leave you? So, I come back. Always like
I just come back, he said to himself as he speckled
the bushes, croton hues. He captured the balata tree,
in the foreground, the razor grass, gri-gri palms
(vi)
The poet’s descriptive language is as vivid as the painter’s colours, as alert to the variations the changing light effects:
The slate-grey sea was beginning to shine through
into a blue, not quite cobalt. The sea rippled
(vii)
So, the poet is imaginatively positioned as Cazabon’s partner in this artistic quest to see and resee the island. (Indeed, the region, as later in the book Scott retraces some of the painter’s journeys to other islands, and to Guyana and the South American mainland.) The image of two Caribbean artists, tramping their island, seeing things afresh, fascinated by the light and the sea and the landscape that they encounter, inevitably calls to mind the young Derek Walcott and his partner in painting “Gregorias”—Dunstan St Omer, exploring Saint Lucia as chronicled in Walcott’s long autobiographical poem, Another Life. Scott refers to Walcott and Another Life in his preface, but more in terms of Walcott’s own aspirations as a painter. One way and another, though, Walcott is quite a presence in this book. The collection is in part dedicated to his memory, and we learn that Walcott had seen drafts of some of Scott’s poems and offered encouragement. And, of course, Walcott had played with a similar kind of theme in Tiepolo’s Hound, in which he engages with the life of another nineteenth-century Caribbean-born painter, Camille Pissarro, but in an entirely different way. In poem (XXV) of Tiepolo’s Hound, Walcott refers to both painters:
Cazabon and Pissarro: the first is ours,
the second found the prism that was Paris
He is contrasting Cazabon’s re-engaging with the Trinidad of his childhood with Pissarro’s seeming abandonment of the islands for the life of an artist in Paris. Stylistically, too, Tiepolo’s Hound is very different from the ways Scott writes in Looking for Cazabon, so there is no direct comparison; but in ways that seem to me entirely positive: one has a sense that Walcott’s example, his ways of thinking about form and metaphor and the things that poetry can do in the Caribbean, informs Scott’s practice as well.
The main dedicatee of Waiting for Cazabon and the other presence that informs some of the most tender and moving poems is Scott’s long-time partner, Jenny Green. In another echo of Cazabon’s experience, Scott was physically separated from her for periods during his stay in Trinidad, just as Cazabon was painfully conscious of having to be separated from his wife and family at various times. In a recent reading he gave as part of the Bocas at the British Library event, when he was asked about this, he read the poem “ii” from the “After Cazabon, On the Road” sequence, which, after passages of vivid description of the tropical weather sweeping across the view from his verandah, concludes:
All this in an afternoon,
while I wait for your call to startle me
with a voice at once familiar and new.
In the discussion that followed, Scott contrasted the two or three weeks Cazabon had to wait for letters sent from France by his wife with the comparative ease of modern technological communication. But still that sense of dislocation, “a voice at once familiar and new”, the sense of her being “elsewhere” is magnified by the ordinariness of a phone call that might begin with a discussion of the weather. There are poems throughout the collection on the poet’s feelings about absence, loneliness and love that are focused by these long periods of separation. The sequence “Departures” includes several. Perhaps the bleakest is “Alamanda Court”:
Two portraits stare at me, those years with laughs
then ourselves now, old age, when faces sag.
We have risked farewells before, interludes,
rehearsals for that final departure
when I, or you, will introduce the prelude,
the other present in the past’s rapture,
to the final act. And then, that too will lapse,
present, past, future, fade away, collapse.
But perhaps that isn’t so bleak, rather a truth that can be/needs to be confronted, made easier to address in the context of this extended exploration of separation.
Although there are passing references to the darker facets of life in twenty-first century Trinidad, this a joyful and celebratory collection. Scott is at home in the vocabularies and rhythms of the island: they seep into the seemingly formal English in which these poems are written. The conceit of seeing with Cazabon, as it were, allows Scott to play with the local/stranger issues unselfconsciously and to engage with the island as he uncovers/recovers it. It is a fine collection in its own right but will also add a dimension to a reading of Light Falling on Bamboo. Altogether a book to celebrate.