Paul Batchelor, Poetry Review, Vol 96:4, Winter 2006/7

Here are three poets who differ greatly in their backgrounds, resources and priorities; but are united by having had to create or re-imagine their literary traditions. Lorna Goodison, for example, was born and grew up in Jamaica, but now teaches at Michigan University. She wonders about the effect of Western culture on her work: 'Perhaps if you remain you will become civilised, / detached, refined, your words pruned of lush.' I don't think there's any danger of this happening: Goodison's language draws much of its strength from the divisions and oppositions of Jamaica's history. To take just one example, when she refers to the emancipation of chattel slavery as '1838 the year of general full free', we sense the tension between the European imposition of the date and the Anglo-Caribbean term for the event.

Perhaps such contradictions are necessary to a poet's development: certainly, Goodison's twin virtues are her restraint and her ear for the incantatory rolling rhythm. Take these lines from 'Where the Flora of Our Village Came From':

Coffee, kola, ackee, yams, okra, plantain, guinea grass,
tamarind seeds and herbs of language to flavor English;
those germinated under our tongues and were cultured
within our intestines during the time of forced crossings.

Here, Goodison characteristically matches delight in her language's overflowing exuberance with exactitude and precision: consider the amount of work being done by that deferred verb 'cultured'.

In 'So Who Was the Mother of Jamaican Art', Goodison describes a 'nameless woman' whose children have been sold into slavery. The woman who makes dolls as substitute children: 'She suspended those wood babies from a rope / round her neck, before she ate she fed them, / touched bits of pounded yam and plantains / to sealed lips; always urged them to sip water.' The poem ends by telling us 'She did not sign her work'. The refusal to expand on the event that triggered this compulsive behaviour - or to spell out the links the title makes between such anonymous acts of reparation and Jamaican culture - acts as a demand that the reader consider such issues. But I am in danger of making Goodison's work sound worthy, dry or dull. In fact, the fluency of her rhythms, the dazzling imagery and the celebratory impulse all make Goldengrove a distinguished, outstanding pleasure.
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