Search results for ""Author Lorna Goodison""

Lorna Goodison's family made their home in the Jamaican village to which her great-grandfather gave his name: Harvey River. Her mother Doris was a big-hearted lover of big stories and raised Lorna on tales of their family's - and Jamaica's - history. Gorgeously written with unashamed joy, From Harvey River weaves together memories with island folklore to create a vivid and irresistible story of mothers and daughters, family, and the ties that bind us to home.

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The lyric energy, compassion, humor, and tenderness that characterize Lorna Goodison's work are once again in evidence in Turn Thanks, her seventh collection. Here the Jamaican poet turns to acknowledge her own ancestors and those of her craft: mother and father, aunts and uncles, Africa, William Wordsworth, Vincent Van Gogh, the Wild Woman. "Whether you will receive this letter or not I cannot tell," she writes. "Still, I intend to send it . . . "

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Writing in The Hudson Review, David Mason has characterized Lorna Goodison's work as a "revelation to me, much of it beautiful for its simple negotiation of the line between life and art." One of the most distinguished contemporary poets of the Caribbean, Goodison draws on both African and European inheritances in her finely crafted poems, which often carry a sense of language's healing power in the face of the pain of the past. She deals thematically with the struggle of Caribbean women and writes in a fashion that has developed from conversational to more ritualistic. From reviews of Goodison's earlier works: "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." Andrew Salkey -- World Literature Today "A marvelous poet, one to savor and to chant aloud." -- Pat Monaghan, Booklist

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Presents a varied selection of poems from "Travelling Mercies" (2001) and "Controlling the Silver" (2004), together with twenty other poems. Moving between standard English and the speech of her guinea woman grandmother, and between story and song, the author aims to bring dignity to the everyday and grace to all our experiences.

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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.

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A colourful new collection by one of the outstanding Caribbean poets of our time.

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The Collected Poems (Second Impression) of Jamaica's Poet Laureate (2017-2020) and winner of The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2019. 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 tropics 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 Cape Town and Far Rockaway.

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Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2022. An Irish Times Best Poetry Books of 2021. 'Lorna Goodison has come to be recognised as a hugely significant and influential contemporary author both at home and internationally,' Simon Armitage declared, when she was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2019. 'Through poems rooted in her Caribbean heritage and upbringing she has created a body of enchanting, intelligent and socially aware poetry in the authentic registers of her own tongue.' Her poems have always found voices for the voiceless and shown another side of history. Her new book zones in on two great under-regarded figures to whom Jamaican music owes a substantial debt: Sister Mary Ignatius and Anita 'Margarita' Mahfood. Sister Iggy, as the boys called her, ran the Alpha Boys School for wayward boys. There she mentored many of Jamaica's most gifted musicians, including the brilliant trombonist Don Drummond. Anita 'Margarita' Mahfood (Mahfouz) was a strikingly beautiful dancer of Lebanese descent, who became Don Drummond's lover. The poems in Mother Muse move boldy and range widely; here are praise songs alongside laments; notable women such as Mahalia Jackson share pages with the less well noted - women like Sandra Bland, Windrush victims and two of the last enslaved women to be set free.

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