Description
At the core of this collection are poems that chart the attempt to come to terms with the life shattering loss of two relationships: father and husband. They explore, with a great exactness, the connections between inner feelings and the physical context for those feelings: the Jamaican landscape, and the promptings of external phenomena to memory. They 'sip the brine of loss: proof that I have lived'. Though in one sense Gwyneth Barber Wood writes against the grain of much recent Jamaican poetry by writing almost exclusively in standard English (the one occasion when she uses nation language is all the more powerful by contrast) and using traditional forms of verse, her poems are intensely Jamaican. Those poems that are set in England are almost wholly defined by Jamaican absences. A London silence becomes all the more empty as the memory of 'someone's bashment in the valley welled/ up in my head.' Elsewhere there is a careful attention to the quality of Jamaican light that subtly maps shifts of mood, as when the shadow of the dying day 'creases the backs of hills', where what has once been solid becomes fragile and subject to change.
Gwyneth Barber Wood is a quiet, but distinctive new voice in Jamaican and Caribbean poetry. She has a gift for vividly detailed yet compressed narratives (of, for instance, her childhood recall of the breaking up of her parent's marriage) that say as much as short stories twenty times the length, of telling detail (hearing a friend's grief, for example, in the 'quiet crackle of a phone') and striking metaphor (forgiveness 'spawns like a salmon in brackish grey').
