Collected Poems

Lorna Goodison is a poet alive to places, from the loved and lived-in world of Jamaica where she began and started a family, to the United States and Canada where she has made her teaching career, but always re-connecting with her Caribbean roots. She travels with an ear alert to histories and voices. How differently English sounds in the tropi and in colder lands, at seaside in sunlight and on prairies, mountains and in cities. The same words say quite different things, depending on who speaks them and who's listening, obeying or resisting. She covers a wide range of subjects and themes, too. Her instinct is to celebrate being alive in a world that is rich but in peril. 'And what is the rare quality that has gone out of poetry that these marvellous poems restore?' asks Derek Walcott. 'Joy.' The 'mango of poetry', eaten straight from the tree, Goodison somehow finds growing in Wordsworth country and in Sligo, in Russia and Norway, in Spain and Portugal which spilled their empires into the Caribbean, in Hungary and Far Rockaway. // 'The publication of Lorna Goodison's Collected Poems — with their extraordinary music, sensuous texture, and powerful historical imagination — is a major event. These are poems stunningly alive to the nuances of language, beautifully pitched and tuned, rich with feeling and insight.' Jahan Ramazani // 'Lorna Goodison brings herself into the presence of every poem, and so into the presence of her readers. Like the ideal teacher, she enables us to hear history sing its joy and shout its rage in her own personal tones of voice, and to feel the folds and textures of her various homelands like a display of rich cloths. She excels in both the emblematic and descriptive powers of popular poetry, and introduces us to an array of characters sharply but generously perceived, and often as deliciously audible after death as in life. This is an inspiring collection for a time when hopes for transnational unity are profoundly challenged. Goodison's poems frequently acknowledge the complex unhealed scars of imperial greed and violence, but the impulse is towards hope, and our imaginations are enchanted by a potential global spring of warmth, nourishment, camaraderie and sheer fun. In the poet's own words of gratitude to “Miss Mirry African bush healing woman”, we should “turn thanks now” to Lorna Goodison for addressing us across so many years on her unique world-service of human truth — and stay tuned.' Carol Rumens