Renowned poet Lorna Goodison has written a new collection of elegies and praise songs which explore the close link between history and genealogy in the Caribbean experience. Her subjects range from the economic genius of market women to the complex beauty of the natural world.
| Contents Island Aubade Invocation Dear Cousin Excavating Ode to the Watchman Our Ancestral Dwellings Recalling the Fourteen Hour Drive The Wandering Jew and the Arab Merchant Passing the Grace Vessels of Calabash So Who Was the Mother of Jamaican Art? Jah the Baptist Poison Crab Let Us Now Praise Famous Women Fool-Fool Rose is Leaving Labour in Vain Savannah Rainstorm is Weeping: An Arawak Folk Tale Revisited Aunt Albertha Aunt Rose The Burden Bearer Travelling with Photographs of Our Generations Hosay Creation Story: Why Our Island is Shaped Like a Turtle These Three Butterflies and One Bird The Geovangelist Don C And the Goldman Posse 5 Back To Where We Came From O Pirates Yes They Rob I Tombstones Where the Flora of Our Village Came From By the Light of a Jamaican Moon Lessons Learned from the Royal Primer Hirfa of Egypt What of Tuktoo? Arctic, Antarctic, Atlantic, Pacific, Indian Ocean Louis Galdy of the World's Once Wickedest City Remittance Man Black Like This? Pleasant Sunday Evenings Passing the Empty Playground What the Witnesses Saw When They Entered The Balm Yard This River Named by our Great Grandfather River Mumma The River Mumma Wants Out The Wisdom Of Cousin Fool-Fool Rose In the Field of Broken Pots But I May Be Reborn As Keke At Harmony Hall Change If You Must Just Change Slow Urban Legends Whatever Became of MaMud? The Yard Man: An Election Poem Controlling the Silver 6 Old Blue Nun Making Life Your Ice Art, Michigan Broadview Missing the Goat Spirit Catcher The Crying Philosopher and the Laughing Philosopher All Souls Day Hard Food Breadfruit Thoughts Upon Her Wide Altar Carnevale Aunt Ann San Juan Poem Palm Roses At the Keswick Museum Bam Chi Chi La La: London, 1969 Half Moon Bay Arriving at The Airport Once Called Idlewild Apollo Double Bill Guernica I Buy My Son A Reed I Saw Charles Mingus A Simple Apology |"Superlatives glint all over commentary on Lorna Goodison's work these days. She is now 'one of the greatest!,' 'one of the most important,' 'a singular voice,' 'a poet of great stature' and of course 'one of the best writing in English today.' She deserves all of this. . . . She is solidly located in the trinity of Caribbean writing. It is now, officially, Walcott, Braithwaite and Goodison."—Kwame Dawes, Caribbean Writer
"A poetry that is both innocently free-ranging and intellectually sharp, sensuously abundant yet elegantly restrained."—Times Literary Supplement
"A world class writer."—Globe and Mail
|Lorna Goodison is an associate professor of English at the University of Michigan. Her work appears in the new Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, and her honors include the Musgrave Gold Medal from the Institute of Jamaica and the prestigious Henry Russel Award from the University of Michigan. Her previous books include To Us, All Flowers are Roses, Turn Thanks, and Travelling Mercies.