Mel Cooke, Freelance Writer
WITH A life-sized bust at the Peace Memorial Hall in Kingstown, St. Vincent, there is no doubt about Shake Keane's writing ability. However, even if that information was not on the back of The Angel Horn the poems, spanning four decades, constitute a monument of note.
The 182 pages of poetry are divided into six books, Smiles In The Heart of the Family, Eve and Adams, Thirteen Studies In Home Economics, Palm and Octopus, The Wisdom-Keepers and Brooklyn Themes, with the title poem Angel Horn coming in an epilogue.
Although Keane died in 1997 and The Angel Horn published eight years later, information about the author tells us that he determined not only the order of the five books, but also the order of the individual poems. Each poem is not only dated, most by the exact day, but also the place where they were written is also stated.
With the last being first, Angel Horn, written for Erik, is the poem of a man looking back at his life and towards the end of it (Keane would die that same year). The trumpet plays a pivotal role, as:
"When I was born
my father gave to me
an angelhorn
With wings of melody?"
And as he had stomach cancer, Keane must have known the end was near, as he wrote:
"Now light is low,
new angels come and go.
The passion tree
Spreads dense as destiny.
And this angelhorn
strives like the lifting dawn!"
Another life poem comes in my favourite book within a book, Thirteen Studies in Home Economics, in which Keane bases his poems on numerals and some pretty adroit mathematics (which is perfectly natural, as music and math are intertwined). In Lesson Seven: Credential, Keane writes in the people's language of St. Vincent:
"Six year ole
an' me farder gimme a trumpit
an' 'e show me
how to blow it
how to polish it
how to respec' it
An' 'e say
exercise yo potential".
The poem goes through various dismissals of the trumpet by his peers and even a girlfriend, even as he comes back from 'farin' and people ask "where yo big car/where yo wool-hat" In response, he
"Nice up me credential
same one wha' me farder show
how fe polish
how fe respec'
how fe blow
an Ah say?// 3/4! Sxhf=+f@@@?"
Now that is a reply.
Keane scoops heavily from his island's culture and speaks several times in her tongue in The Wisdom-Keepers, which is sub-titled 'Three Poems Located in the Voice of the Tea-Meetion, The Kaiso, The Folk (Jumbie) Metaphysic, And Other Traditional Language Forms'. It is no surprise, then, that he speaks of Anansi and Toucouma, much in the same breath that he says "if Sparrow say is so is so".
Palm and Octopus is sub-titled Twelve Love Poems, and Keane waxes warm in the relatively short poems, saying in And Will You "I swear I have dreamed how/to touch you with my love/over again I feel they finger and find thee".
Keane also delves deep into love in Eve and Adams, but is also love of place as well as person, as he writes in Three Roofs in Roseau:
"There are three roofs left now in Rosea
after the hurricane
Zitrea and her two daughters
were found
drowned there?.
My dear lost and loved Zitrea
Though I have nothing now
I will not be silent
There are three roofs still standing in Roseau"
In the last book, Brooklyn Themes, Keane writes of life in the US after a self-imposed exile, saying in The Islands (A Toast):
"In the isle of Brooklyn,
only sturdy shoulders protect me"
Shake Keane was six feet four.
The Angel Horn is published by House of Nehesi Publishers, based in Philipsburg, St. Martin.
