A selection prepared by John Robert Lee

The poetry of Irvin Desir (1954–2024)

A selection prepared by John Robert Lee

The posthumous collection of poetry Renewal: Poems by Irvin Desir, truly a lost and found Saint Lucia poet, is published by Papillote Press in 2026.

Much admired by fellow Saint Lucian, Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, and his other Saint Lucian contemporaries, his work appeared in a few local anthologies during his lifetime.

Fellow poet Vladimir Lucien has written: ‘There is something poignant, real and bracing about such a publication… we cannot but worship at the altar of a line such as: “You filled this cluttered room / like a handful of clove.” And the newest star of Saint Lucian literature, poet and novelist Canisia Lubrin pays great tribute: “Renewal is poetry of rare gifts. It unfurls as hymn and closes as folklore, both personal and transcendent. Desir’s diamantine lines, marked with the sensual largesse of nature and the surreal, extend the poetry of a Saint Lucia belonging at once to no one and everyone, one ‘of shades and shadows’”’.

Kendel Hippolyte, poet and playwright, and I had been trying from the mid-eighties to publish a chapbook of Irvin’s poetry. We knew him and admired him. A shy retiring younger contemporary, he became quite animated and happy when discussing the poetry of Walcott and the art of Dustan St. Omer, great Saint Lucian painter and church muralist, eulogized in Walcott’s Another Life. Irvin had spent time in Martinique and Barbados, had read great French writers like Baudelaire, and if memory is faithful, St. ...