Guinea Woman

New and Selected Poems

Goodison Lorna

The poetry of Lorna Goodison, Derek Walcott says, "is a rooted, organic delight, true in its intonations to the Jamaican language she loves, fresh in its wit and pain and in the high, spiritual gossip of its leaves".

The poet is endowed with all the resources of her two traditions: the African-Caribbean and the European. Her poems are politically illuminating because of the ways in which she celebrates this dual inheritance. Each subject and theme can choose an appropriate idiom. Rooted though the poems may be in certain elected landscapes, the poet is a free agent and finds her inflections in the interplay between languages and occasions.

Goodison is a black Jamaican woman, but none of those sobriquets adequately defines the rare freedoms that her verse earns from speech and from literature. There is an urgency about her subjects and themes – whether landscape, history or personal experience – which is responsible for the music of her verse.

About the Author

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.

Back to the list of books