Search results for ""Author Velma Pollard""

Crown Point is the first collection of poems by one of the Caribbean's foremost woman poets. Velma Pollard's poems range from affectionate and observant family portraits to the righteous anger of an Afro-Caribbean woman's truth telling. Crown Point closes with a moving series of poems that meditate on death, mourning and their meaning for the living. They speak both of the deaths of parents and grandparents and of 'deaths falling early' and hear always Anancy's susu susu whispering words, 'tiday fi mi / tumaro fi yu'. These are poems which have a quiet, consoling truthfulness, no answers, just the unvarnished reminder that this is the way of life and that the dead remain with us: 'No one philosophy can answer all / each man is an island / each mind is a muffin tin / and so we sit with our invisible pencils / working out strategies to cope with brevity / to cope with our adieux / to love - too sweet to forget / to life - too intense to leave...' These tender elegiac poems of loss and remembrance have an eloquent stillness at their heart. All share a common depth of reflection and concern with poetic craft."Reading... Velma Pollard is to encounter an acutely sensitive consciousness grappling, even in apparently lighter moments, with the complexity of experience." Evelyn O'Callaghan, Jamaica JournalVelma Pollard writes poetry, fiction and studies of language. She was born in Jamaica and works at the University of the West Indies where she is Dean of the Faculty of Education.

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In 1989, Velma Pollard's Considering Woman, a collection of short stories, fables and memoir, announced an important publishing debut. Now, over twenty years later, a second collection, Considering Woman II, various and rich in its own right, is brought into dialogue with the republishing of the earlier pieces in a single volume. Dialogue between its components is, indeed, intrinsic to the organisation of Considering Woman II. Whilst the stories in 'Bitter Tales' are very explicitly set in the past, they are often accompanied by a present-day women's talk commenting on the story. In 'Mrs Uptown' for instance, we learn that what begins as a story of male abandonment, but becomes an account of a woman who finds a good man and happiness, is being told by the now elderly woman to her neighbour at a conference called 'Young Women in Crisis'. It is clear that the world presented in these pungently written stories of rape, abuse and unsupported pregnancies is not safely in the past. And the balancing sequence of 'Better Tales', each of which arrives at some place of epiphany, safety and even contentment, does so in a world where babies are abandoned in pit latrines, where poverty forces families to give away their children, and a young woman has five unsupported children by the age of twenty-five. If the later stories no longer feel the need to reflect on the process and reception of women's writing (which the earlier collection does very wittily), across all the work is an acutely sensitive consciousness of the consequences of the passage of time. 'Gran…', the longest piece in the book, is both a deeply moving account of the consequences of growing old, and a record of a vanishing way of life.Velma Pollard writes poetry, fiction and studies of language. She was born in Jamaica and works at the University of the West Indies where she is Dean of the Faculty of Education.

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Velma Pollard has developed a significant following among her fellow Jamaicans and in the wider Caribbean world. In this collection she will delight these -- and new readers -- with her capacity to unite the personal and the political in a seamless whole. Organized into three sections, the collection explores underlying political concerns, such as the impact of global culture, the dangers of unobstructed American power, and the threat of Islamist opposition. The poems move beyond these problems, however, ultimately seeking resolution through understanding the flow of nature and urging a celebration of life.Velma Pollard writes poetry, fiction and studies of language. She was born in Jamaica and works at the University of the West Indies where she is Dean of the Faculty of Education.

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Velma Pollard is a writer, a researcher, and an educator from Jamaica. She is the author of several books, including" The Best Philosophers I Know Can't Read and Write," "Considering Woman I & II," "Crown Point and Other Poems," and "Shame Trees Don't Grow Here." She is also the recipient of the prestigious Casa de las Americas Prize for her novella "Karl."

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A shame tree is a Jamaican symbol for the development of moral consciousness, and the poems in this collection explore the points at which moral values emerge - and the consequences of their absence. The poems suggest toughly that such consciousness does not grow without unremitting effort and scrupulous sensitivity to feeling, but there is nothing didactic or moralistic about them. They are imaginative recreations of the dramas of coming to consciousness and the inevitable ambiguities of truth. As in all Velma Pollard's work, there is a deeply imbued sense of Caribbean history."Tone and emotion range wider in Velma Pollard's Shame Trees Don't Grow Here... but poincianas bloom - from disgust, anger, and outrage to celebration, awe, and praise; from questioning and condemnation to understanding and reconciliation. The major thrust of the poet's fire comes in the first part of the book where those who lacked or are lacking conscience and moral boundaries are drawn into Pollard's unflinching scrutiny. Wildfire becomes hearth in part two where the beauty and life-enhancing qualities of land, sea, and people are celebrated. Throughout, the poet's skillful use of language remains evident in, for example, her subtle, unobtrusive rhymes that lend musicality to her verse; her puns; double entendres; and other word play."Marvin Williams, The Caribbean WriterVelma Pollard writes poetry, fiction and studies of language. She was born in Jamaica and works at the University of the West Indies where she is Dean of the Faculty of Education.

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