Canticles is a lyric-styled epic. Clarke's visions of canonical and
apocryphal scriptures are black in ink, but lightning in illumination.
Testament II issues re-readings, revisions, rewrites of scriptures
crucial to the emergent (Anglophone) African Diaspora in the Americas.
Canticles II (MMXIX) and Canticles II (MMXX) follow Testament I
(also issued in two parts) whose subject is History, principally, of
slavery and imperialism and liberation and independence. Canticles II
is properly irreverent where necessary, but never blasphemous. It is
scripture become what it always is, really, anyway: Poetry.