Lorna Goodison was born in Jamaica, and has won numerous awards for her writing in both poetry and prose, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Musgrave Gold Medal from Jamaica, the Henry Russel Award for Exceptional Creative Work from the University of Michigan, and one of Canada's largest literary prizes, the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction for From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People (2007). Her work has been included in the major anthologies and collections of contemporary poetry over the past twenty-five years, such as the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, the HarperCollins World Reader, the Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry, the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, and Longman Masters of British Literature. Along with her award winning memoir, she has published three collections of short stories (including By Love Possessed, 2011) and nine collections of poetry. Her work has been translated into many languages, and she has been a central figure at literary festivals throughout the world. Lorna Goodison teaches at the University of Michigan, where she is the Lemuel A. Johnson Professor of English and African and Afroamerican Studies. Lorna Goodison was appointed PoetLaureate of Jamaica on 17 May 2017 and will serve until 2020.
Description
New Poems Balm I Come From a Land On Leaving Goldengrove: A letter and seven notes... Fall Away Iron Filings Where I Come From In Dreams of Shipwreck The Selfishness of Salmon Naming of Flowers To the Buddha Go the Roses Gates of Ivory, Gates of Horn The Lion and the Gypsy Revisited Silence Before Speech Yet Once More I Will Shake Rock of Ages The Cruel Room What Happened to Peter Giovanni Paulo Abraham and Isaac After A Praise Song to Mandiba and the Camphor Trees of Vergelegen Windrush Sankey from Travelling Mercies Spending the Gold of Lovers Travelling Mercies What We Carried That Carried Us The Living Converter Woman of Green Island Never Expect Book Was It Legba She Met Outside the Coronation Market? Moonlight City Run Greyhound Brunette Latini To the heirs of low bequests to harvest and glean... For Love of Marpessa Dawn Miles in Berlin The Garden of St. Michael in the Sevel-Hilled City of Bamberg I am weary of all winters mother Invitations From Heathcliff Poor Mrs. Lot Natal Song Over the Island of Salt Song of the Scapegoat Shining One To Absorb the Green Medicine Bundle of a Blackfoot Woman Her body became a containter for stars Studio I: Brother Everald Brown Studio II: Seymour L. Studio III: Petrona Morrison Studio IV: Barrington Watson Cezanne After Emile Zola Prises in Papine Market Crossover Griot Petition to the Magdalen Iron Shirt My Island Like a Swimming Turtle Questions for Marcus Mosiah Garvey Lush Bam Chi Chi Lala from Controlling the Silver Island Aubade Dear Cousin Excavating Ode to the Watchman Our Ancestral Dwellings The Wandering Jew and the Arab Merchant on the Island of Allspice Passing the Grace Vessels of Calabash So Who Was the Mother of Jamaican Art? Jah the Baptist Poison Crab Fool-Fool Rose is Leaving Labor-in-Vain Savannah Rainstorm is Weeping: An Arawak Folk Tale Revisited Aunt Alberta Aunt Rose The Burden Bearer Hosay Creation Story: Why Our Island is Shaped Like a Turtle These Three Butterflies and One Bird We Interpret as Signs Don C and the Goldman Posse 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 the Little Eskimo? Arctic, Antarctic, Atlantic, Pacific, Indian Ocean Louis Galdy of the World's Once Wickedest City Black Like This? River Mumma The Wisdom of Cousin Fool-Fool Rose In the Field of Broken Pots But I May Be Reborn as Keke Change If You Must Just Change Slow The Yard Man: An Election Poem Controlling the Silver Making Life Your Ice Art, Michigan Broadview Missing the Goat The Crying Philosopher and the Laughing Philosopher Hard Food Rites Aunt Ann The Liberator Speaks At the Keswick Museum Bam Chi Chi La La: London, 1969 Apollo Double Bill Guernica I Buy My Son a Reed I Saw Charles Mingus
Nicholas Laughlin, The Caribbean Review of Books Lorna Goodison's latest volume of poetry combines selections from her previous two collections, Travelling Mercies (2001) and Controlling the Silver (2005; reviewed by Edward Baugh in the February 2000 CRB), with twenty new poems. The poems in Goldengrove are full of flowers, dreams, names, songs, and relics of a Jamaica that only recently passed into memory. These poems are also, in a sense, full of poems. Where I come from, old women bind living words across their flat chests, inscrible them on their foreheads, and in the palms of their hands. The binding of 'living words' recurs in these pages. Readers who 'have the eye' will see that, like the old women of 'Where I Come From', Goodison weaves powerful charms, sometimes for safe passage through life (or death), or to hold and keep, or to soothe. Goodison's poems often celebrate that act of creation, in many forms and guises. Essie the dressmaker in 'I Come From a Land' can 'sew to fit all sizes'. The chemist in 'Balm' blends his magic oils for the aid of the lovestruck. Even migration, in 'Windrush Sankey', is defiantly creative. And in the sequence 'On Leaving Goldengrove', inspired by a nineteenth-century narrative, the unnamed narrator describes his apprenticeship to a 'master of five trades' named Cassamere, who, in a kind of artistic alchemy, uses his practical skills - ...this one man is a restorer and scene painter, fireworks maker, liquor blender, a baker confectioner, besides being Kingston city's tip top dancing master - to astonish, inspire, and illuminate the people around him. The climax of his achievements is a fireworks show that pours light down upon the citizenry: That night Kingstonians went home to tenements, lay down to sleep, and the ancestors dreamed them, blessed and assured them, that what they had seen was but a glimpse of the paradise waiting for them. Derek Walcott asks, 'What is the rare quality that has gone out of poetry that these marvellous poems restore? Joy.' Goodison's poems offer also what is even more rare: grace. Mary Hanna, The Sunday Gleaner 'A triumph of fusions' Prolific, wide-ranging and accomplished, Lorna Goodison's new collection, Goldengrove, is a superb compilation made up of twenty new poems and poems from her two previous books, Travelling Mercies (2001) and Controlling the Silver (2005). As such, this beautiful edition with a cover picture by Goodison allows for clear demonstration of her ability to grow from collection to collection. She has said: 'One of the things I'm very concerned about is that the work should develop. It should develop as I develop as a person, as I develop emotionally and spiritually and in every way.' In an article in the Journal of West Indian Literature, Professor Edward Baugh describes and illuminates Goodison's growth from Tamarind Season (1980), Goodison's first book of poems, through I am Becoming My Mother (1986) to Heartease (1988), her third collection. Baugh notes the development of Goodison's striking ability to speak - as a good poet should - for people 'in proportion as he (the poet) speaks arrestingly of and for himself'. He traces the growth of her ability to merge her personal voice with the communal one, and most especially, to speak movingly for women in all their stations and functions. These traits are found also in the collections presented in Goodison's Goldengrove, as indeed is evidence that the poet's poems - and the pain that accompanies her creating them - have grown larger. Her poems now encompass the world of the Caribbean diaspora and beyond, for we find cultural evidence of voyages to Egypt and India and many references to the old masters in the world of art. Goodison is growing beyond writing to embrace pure imagery: she has seriously undertaken a new discipline, that of painting, and her reach of mind and perception is thereby enhanced. On the back of the book, Derek Walcott is quoted as calling Goodson's most recent poems 'a triumph of fusions'. This approach to writing the self-as-community has the effect of producing joy - 'the rare quality that has gone out of poetry that these marvelous poems restore'. That is high praise indeed. Andrew Salkey once noted astutely that 'The evocative power of Lorna Goodison's poetry derives its urgency and appeal from the heart-and-mind concerns she has for language, history, racial identity, and gender'. Goodison speaks with a voice of great intelligence of these many issues and areas of concern to Caribbean people. She is without doubt one of the finest poets of our region, and a worthy recipient of the Gold Musgrave Medal from Jamaica, her home country. Goodison still speaks fluently across a wide range of Jamaican speech registers although she now lives in North America and teaches at the University of Michigan. This should be of no surprise, for the language of her poems is of the 'heart-and-mind' and is an integral part of her development as a person and a poet. She still writes with sensitive eloquence about erotic and familial love (as Laurence Breiner has noted), but her concerns are now much broader, including signature North American images like salmon swimming upstream ('The Selflessness of Salmon'), and draw on western masters like Dante ('Giovanni Paulo'), but her heart still has at its root the breathtaking images of home: To endure the strict days of ice and winter Come to absorb the green of December grass That egrets bring. Silk cotton blossoming. Do not leave Xamayca forever, your wild self sprouts here like long-limbed guinea grass dispersed, blown about and tossed, seeded first off the Guinea coast. You are African star grass. Settle lightly, moved by breath of unknowing. The egrets perch upon the trees like birds, Blossoms of birds, or white- feathered flowers. ('To Absorb the Green', from Travelling Mercies) From the recent poems we find a simple (and gendered) version of homesickness, also fused with African elements and nation language: I come from a land where the same shop offers morning breakfast, dressmaking and fish. Where the port of St Mary is inscribed in Spanish and called in the tongue of Twi. Essie say the water cold the canoe cannot go forth for fish take low and gone deep. No fish today, try greens. ('I Come From a Land') 'Where I Come From' also expresses an essential Jamaican-ness through the personas of the old women who 'bind living words/across their flat chests' and reach for 'medicine words' of healing from where they have recorded them at 'the base of their bellies'. The long sequence on the apprentice Cassamere in 'On Leaving Goldengrove' shows Goodison's extraordinary versatility and narrative capability, for it is the story of 'the master of at least five trades' and his career in seven poems. Its texture brings to mind 'Controlling the Silver', the title poem of that collection, where we learn how the women of Benin, removed from their homeland, came to control silver enough to 'buy land, even to lend to massa'. When silver disappears from the banks, it reappears on the bodies of the African women: Not a threepence, a sixpence, not one florin. No metal-alloyed between the stirring notes. Not even a lion-pon-it shilling to connect one pound to guinea, absent all the silver, except for that revolving around the body of our women like Jupiter's multiple moons, plunging between black mountains of bosom into drawstring vaults of calico threadbags. Goodison ranges the globe in Travelling Mercies and Collecting the Silver, but in her recent poems she returns home with a mission to right history ('The Cruel Room') and to pay tribute to its makers ('What Happened to Peter'). She speaks of Peter Tosh in the warm tones of one artist praising another: My impression of him was he was a shy man, private behind those shades he never took off. Between him and everyone else he maintained a wall of smoke. She closes her tribute with a magnificent blessing: thank you Peter Tosh for helping us get up stand up. As I watched him step off rolling lambsbread into blunt, wherever he lives now, what a music. One could say the same of Lorna Goodson: wherever she lives now, what a music! As well as the Gold Musgrave, Lorna Goodison has been awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Henry Russel Award from the University of Michigan. Her work, which has been widely translated and anthologized, appears in the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Paul Batchelor, Poetry Review, Vol 96:4, Winter 2006/7 Here are three poets who differ greatly in their backgrounds, resources and priorities; but are united by having had to create or re-imagine their literary traditions. Lorna Goodison, for example, was born and grew up in Jamaica, but now teaches at Michigan University. She wonders about the effect of Western culture on her work: 'Perhaps if you remain you will become civilised, / detached, refined, your words pruned of lush.' I don't think there's any danger of this happening: Goodison's language draws much of its strength from the divisions and oppositions of Jamaica's history. To take just one example, when she refers to the emancipation of chattel slavery as '1838 the year of general full free', we sense the tension between the European imposition of the date and the Anglo-Caribbean term for the event. Perhaps such contradictions are necessary to a poet's development: certainly, Goodison's twin virtues are her restraint and her ear for the incantatory rolling rhythm. Take these lines from 'Where the Flora of Our Village Came From': Coffee, kola, ackee, yams, okra, plantain, guinea grass, tamarind seeds and herbs of language to flavor English; those germinated under our tongues and were cultured within our intestines during the time of forced crossings. Here, Goodison characteristically matches delight in her language's overflowing exuberance with exactitude and precision: consider the amount of work being done by that deferred verb 'cultured'. In 'So Who Was the Mother of Jamaican Art', Goodison describes a 'nameless woman' whose children have been sold into slavery. The woman who makes dolls as substitute children: 'She suspended those wood babies from a rope / round her neck, before she ate she fed them, / touched bits of pounded yam and plantains / to sealed lips; always urged them to sip water.' The poem ends by telling us 'She did not sign her work'. The refusal to expand on the event that triggered this compulsive behaviour - or to spell out the links the title makes between such anonymous acts of reparation and Jamaican culture - acts as a demand that the reader consider such issues. But I am in danger of making Goodison's work sound worthy, dry or dull. In fact, the fluency of her rhythms, the dazzling imagery and the celebratory impulse all make Goldengrove a distinguished, outstanding pleasure. ... In their new collections of poems, Lorna Goodison and Jacqueline Bishop take us on a Caribbean journey to experience with them the local scents and rhythms, the tropical winds, the ambivalence of cultural origins, and the conflicting urges to fly away or swim back. Each offers a different perspective, yet both explore the very nature of a work of art, and deal with such fundamental themes of contemporary writing as alienation and belonging, exile and homeland, motherhood, and the possibility of combining different languages and traditions. Lorna Goodison's precious Goldengrove opens with her eagerly-awaited 'New Poems' which confirm her standing as one of today's most commanding voices in world poetry. The second and third parts offer poems from Travelling Mercies and Controlling the Silver, which are read anew, becoming part of another ideal whole. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine them removed from the new order envisioned by the artist. T S Eliot's words on collective memory, on the changes brought upon old works of art by the creation of new ones, ring truer with Goodison's new achievement. Goodison proves once again her miraculous ability to interact with past poets and ancestors, to weave past and present, to recreate old works of art in today's language. The voyage Goodison has set as the centre of her work, the voyage of ancestors away from freedom and into slavery, comes to symbolise many other voyages, as it also becomes our voyage towards awareness and through the collective artistic memory of humankind. We join her as she travels through old and new themes, fusing them into a circular structure, where poems from the three parts of the collection echo each other, building on each other, their lines becoming threads, directions, in an ideal route. Identity and belonging are the first threads we recognize and hold: they become our Ariadne's threads, but also story-lines written in blood and carved on the flesh. Though the style may vary from one poem to another, the overall structure is that of a single powerful dramatic monologue. With the introductory sonnet-like 'Balm' the Caribbean magic works on our senses, and we enter a world of sensuality, love and passion, welcomed by fragrances of a chemist's shop, the 'dispenser' who sells love potions, oils full of promises, the 'Oil of hold, oil of keep and never leave'. We are at first delighted by the long section of 'On Leaving Goldengrove' written in the style of an eighteenth-century verse epistolary novel, where the narrator recounts how he has become 'apprentice to Cassamere', master of five trades. Then, the festive verses give way to stories of loss and exile. The tone is now lyrical and we are following another thread, language. Goodison's fascination with language becomes tangible in 'Where I Come From', where bodies of 'old women' are turned into scriptures, legacies, their flesh inscribed with words, carved with old 'cures' and old stories, transformed into texts for future generations so that tradition, memory and language may be passed on to posterity. As the first part is coming to a close, and before we move on to meet familiar faces in a new light, we share the sadness of the narrator, who has told us the reasons for going away, for boarding a ship that sailed 'across the wide water' to the 'land / England', a new place that 'I must now make my home' ('Windrush Sankey'). With the past always present, personal histories are interwoven with that of a whole people, as we follow their collective suffering through Goodison's powerful version of Canto XV from Dante's Inferno ('Brunetto Latini') to the redeeming beauty of 'Island Aubade', to be soothed at last 'By the Light of a Jamaican Moon'. We close the book, perhaps Goodison's finest virtuoso language performance, with regret, intoxicated by her elegant verses - her love potions - balm for our souls. [...]