Collected Poems by Lorna Goodison Carcanet, 2017 Paperback, ISBN 978 1 784104 66 5
Reviewed by Carmen Bugan
Lorna Goodison’s direct poem “A brief history of a Jamaican family” represents the theme of her country’s painful past that marks her poetic oeuvre. It’s a past that includes colonization, slavery, mass economic migration, and natural disasters, leaving her people to search for a better life. The wealth of those who took advantage of the poor, pushing them onto foreign shores, was built with “Widow’s mites and orphan’s heritage” (p.46). The poet uses alliteration (“fat”, ”foreign”, “family”, “floats”) and precise images to bring home the sense of bitterness that comes with the inevitable renunciation of one’s dignity in order to survive:
The fat inheritor twice removed, oils a smile
and once again bids poor man, come
give me what’s left of your dignity
with that and foreign money, your family floats again. (p. 47)
These lines allude to the poem “New Colossus”, which is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty to greet people seeking a better life in the United States:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
This gesture links the two countries on the subject of migration that is fully expressed in many of Goodison’s other poems, offering a vision far off from the idealism of the “New Colossus”.
Collected Poems gathers work that has brought Goodison worldwide recognition over the past forty years. She is the first woman Poet Laureate of Jamaica and a Professor Emerita of English and African and Afroamerican Studies at the University of Michigan. Goodison’s poetry, which has been translated into many languages, has won major international awards including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Musgrave Gold Medal from Jamaica, and the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. Among the anthologies which have featured her work are the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Longman Masters of British Literature, HarperCollins World Reader, Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry and Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces.
Goodison’s wide-ranging poetry navigates the language of the Jamaican dispossessed migrant and the learned academic traveler with breathtaking honesty and ease. Poems about being a woman searching for another life across countries with their varied welcomes, their languages and dialects, return to their ambition to “try again/to paint a new landscape/for tired eyes” (“Déjà vu”, p.26). They turn the focus on the human struggle witnessed in Jamaica and the United States, Africa and Europe, the immigrant back streets of London and the splendors of the world’s richest museums. Erudite and observant, Goodison writes about encountering a friend, who bleaches her skin to be white (“My late friend”, p.18) seeking a better life. One of her speakers has “covered that maroon tint/with education’s sheepskin” (“Hymn to Blanche”, p. 34), the sarcasm implying a skeptical view on changing one’s fortune. She writes about the prayers and the hopes of her people, shows them struggling with social problems, and with being victims of racism. At the bottom of these poems lurks the question of robbed personal identity.
In the extraordinary poem, “In city gardens grow no roses as we known them”, there appears the patron saint of poets who was “condemned to interpret the dreams/ and visions of tyrants and asphalt rivers” (p.156), in a poetics resonant of Milosz.
The poems vary in form as much as in their subject: pieces may start with short stanzas, move through to prose, and meander back to various length stanzas of wildly different line lengths. They are like the body of the woman: stretching, evolving, ageing, constantly changing shape, as it absorbs hardship and time. Goodison’s images are earthy and beautiful as the “sound, stained from travelling underground/smelling of poor people’s dinners” (“Jah music”, p. 84) or the migrants who “were cooks in the kitchens of gracious homes” and planted for themselves “mint and angels” (“In city gardens grow no roses as we known them”, p. 153) in small pots, to ward off homesickness and feeling like second class citizens. At times their solitude is palpable: “is only me and God/alone, going down the road” (“Sister Mary and the Devil”, p. 8). Her language is generous and rich, blending Jamaican dialect with the lyric tradition of English, portraying her own poetic inheritance and her people’s ways of speaking.
Goodison prefaces her Collected Poems with a verse from Ezra, who had been summoned by God to write all that had been done in the world, so that, through his words people will find their path to him. She quotes part of the verse as her epigraph: ‘I Shall Light a Candle of Understanding in Thine Heart Which Shall Not Be Put Out’ 2 Esdras:xiv:25 The full sentence ends with these words: ‘till the things be performed which thou shalt begin to write’. God had instructed Ezra to publish a part of what God had dictated to him and share the other part with wise people who could interpret the laws. She transforms this verse into her own dialogue with God, and to her readers, she offers the following, in her own words:
By the illumination of that candle
exit, death and fear and doubt
here love and possibility
within a lit heart, shining out.
Goodison’s poems, about race, identity, migration and God, are ripe for our times, when the language of the powerful has descended to its darkest and the most disturbing places yet.
The fat inheritor twice removed, oils a smile
and once again bids poor man, come
give me what’s left of your dignity
with that and foreign money, your family floats again. (p. 47)
These lines allude to the poem “New Colossus”, which is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty to greet people seeking a better life in the United States:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
This gesture links the two countries on the subject of migration that is fully expressed in many of Goodison’s other poems, offering a vision far off from the idealism of the “New Colossus”.
Collected Poems gathers work that has brought Goodison worldwide recognition over the past forty years. She is the first woman Poet Laureate of Jamaica and a Professor Emerita of English and African and Afroamerican Studies at the University of Michigan. Goodison’s poetry, which has been translated into many languages, has won major international awards including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Musgrave Gold Medal from Jamaica, and the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. Among the anthologies which have featured her work are the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Longman Masters of British Literature, HarperCollins World Reader, Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry and Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces.
Goodison’s wide-ranging poetry navigates the language of the Jamaican dispossessed migrant and the learned academic traveler with breathtaking honesty and ease. Poems about being a woman searching for another life across countries with their varied welcomes, their languages and dialects, return to their ambition to “try again/to paint a new landscape/for tired eyes” (“Déjà vu”, p.26). They turn the focus on the human struggle witnessed in Jamaica and the United States, Africa and Europe, the immigrant back streets of London and the splendors of the world’s richest museums. Erudite and observant, Goodison writes about encountering a friend, who bleaches her skin to be white (“My late friend”, p.18) seeking a better life. One of her speakers has “covered that maroon tint/with education’s sheepskin” (“Hymn to Blanche”, p. 34), the sarcasm implying a skeptical view on changing one’s fortune. She writes about the prayers and the hopes of her people, shows them struggling with social problems, and with being victims of racism. At the bottom of these poems lurks the question of robbed personal identity.
In the extraordinary poem, “In city gardens grow no roses as we known them”, there appears the patron saint of poets who was “condemned to interpret the dreams/ and visions of tyrants and asphalt rivers” (p.156), in a poetics resonant of Milosz.
The poems vary in form as much as in their subject: pieces may start with short stanzas, move through to prose, and meander back to various length stanzas of wildly different line lengths. They are like the body of the woman: stretching, evolving, ageing, constantly changing shape, as it absorbs hardship and time. Goodison’s images are earthy and beautiful as the “sound, stained from travelling underground/smelling of poor people’s dinners” (“Jah music”, p. 84) or the migrants who “were cooks in the kitchens of gracious homes” and planted for themselves “mint and angels” (“In city gardens grow no roses as we known them”, p. 153) in small pots, to ward off homesickness and feeling like second class citizens. At times their solitude is palpable: “is only me and God/alone, going down the road” (“Sister Mary and the Devil”, p. 8). Her language is generous and rich, blending Jamaican dialect with the lyric tradition of English, portraying her own poetic inheritance and her people’s ways of speaking.
Goodison prefaces her Collected Poems with a verse from Ezra, who had been summoned by God to write all that had been done in the world, so that, through his words people will find their path to him. She quotes part of the verse as her epigraph: ‘I Shall Light a Candle of Understanding in Thine Heart Which Shall Not Be Put Out’ 2 Esdras:xiv:25 The full sentence ends with these words: ‘till the things be performed which thou shalt begin to write’. God had instructed Ezra to publish a part of what God had dictated to him and share the other part with wise people who could interpret the laws. She transforms this verse into her own dialogue with God, and to her readers, she offers the following, in her own words:
By the illumination of that candle
exit, death and fear and doubt
here love and possibility
within a lit heart, shining out.
Goodison’s poems, about race, identity, migration and God, are ripe for our times, when the language of the powerful has descended to its darkest and the most disturbing places yet.
