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OracabessaLorna Goodison
Categories: 21st Century, Caribbean, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (157 pages) (Pub. Oct 2013) 9781847772428 £12.95 £11.65 eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE! (Pub. Oct 2013) 9781847775030 £10.36 £9.32 To use the EPUB version, you will need to have Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed on your device. You can find out more at https://www.adobe.com/uk/solutions/ebook/digital-editions.html. Please do not purchase this version if you do not have and are not prepared to install, Adobe Digital Editions.
To Make Various Sorts of Black
According to The Craftsman’s Handbook, chapter XXXVII “Il Libro dell’ Arte” by Cennino d’Andrea Cennini who tells us there are several kinds of black colours. First, there is a black derived from soft black stone. It is a fat colour; not hard at heart, a stone unctioned. Then there is a black that is obtained from vine twigs. Twigs that choose to abide on the true vine offering up their bodies at the last to be burned, then quenched and worked up, they can live again as twig of the vine black; not a fat, more of a lean colour, favoured alike by vinedressers and artists. There is also the black that is scraped from burnt shells. Markers of Atlantic’s graves. Black of scorched earth, of torched stones of peach;twisted trees that bore strange fruit. And then there is the black that is the source of light from a lamp full of oil such as any thoughtful guest waiting for bride and groom who cometh will have. A lamp you light and place underneath – not a bushel – but a good clean everyday dish that is fit for baking. Now bring the little flame of the lamp up to the under surface of the earthenware dish (say a distance of two or three fingers away) and the smoke that emits from that small flame will struggle up to strike at clay. Strike till it crowds and collects in a mess or a mass; now wait, wait a while please, before you sweep this colour – now sable velvet soot – off onto any old paper or consign it to shadows, outlines, and backgrounds. Observe: it does not need to be worked up nor ground; it is just perfect as it is. Refill the lamp, Cennini says. As many times as the flame burns low, refill it. Oracabessa is a book of risky journeys, mappings and re-mappings, as the poet navigates place, history and imagination. Goodison travels to Spain and Portugal, to Canada (‘Winter has landed’) and back to the Hope Gardens of her childhood in Jamaica; even to the Old Testament world of Ruth and Hagar. Throughout her journeys she hymns the artists who inspire her: El Greco, John Donne, Billie Holiday, ‘Miles Marley Mozart’. At the end of travel, she is, as she says, ‘Still on the road to Heartease’.
What is the rare quality that has gone out of poetry that these marvellous poems restore? Joy. Derek Walcott
To Make Various Sorts of Black
To Make Various Sorts of Black Reporting Back to Queen Isabella You Should Go to Toledo New Sketches of Spain O Africans in the Plazas of Madrid Bookmarks for Eyes O Lisboa Not Sadness La Casa Dos Dourados In a Dream My Mother Says In a Little Spanish Town I Google Father Louis In Days of Sail It Is Sunday in Sevilla Sintra’s Glorious Eden, After Lord Byron Postcards to Miles Spinning in the Head Ideas of Home Praise to the Limping Angel Praise to the Limping Angel Limonade Shimmer of Autumn Air Over Aroma of Roast Corn A Cure A Visit to the East At Lunch in Les Deux Magots Remember Us in Motherland Hope Gardens Hope Gardens Quest Gauguin Girl Our First Christian Martyr My Teacher Lena Reading Through the Wall Bookmobile Days Tagore on the Bookmobile Town Drunk Recites Omar Khayyam Need In the Blue Boarding House In the Blue Boarding House A Small Blues for Lady’s Gardenia Dance Card Otis Ode Paul Robeson at Athena’s Red T-Shirt The Two Sisters Cave Your Heart Bye Boonoonoonoos Bye Boonoonoonoos One in a Long Line Our Blessed Country Lady On Sighting Makak by the Roadside The Bear A New State What Does It Mean Everyday Revelations Morning Ballad A Cleanse Petition Note to Self Charlie Chaplin at Golden Clouds Canto I Soon It Is Going To Rain Milk Ruth Hagar’s Account Be It Done Unto Me According To Your Word Soon It Is Going To Rain Milk St Michael in Sitka Mr Davis Runs the Voodoo Down Some of My Worst Wounds Again From the Bard’s Book of Common Prayer Upsetter About the Kind Who Wrestle With You All Night Some More Things You Do Not Know About Me I am a Love Siren Acknowledgements
Awards won by Lorna Goodison
Short-listed, 2022 The Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry
(Mother Muse) Winner, 2019 The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry Winner, 2018 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Poetry
Praise for Lorna Goodison
'The humble and humbling quality of Goodison's poems has been bedded in a sorrow that is also an exuberance, as if neither can survive without the other. When she uses a striking metaphor, it seems just to have occurred to her, driven by deftness of perception rather than the pressure and labor of invention... Goodison's poems display what we should always look for, a new way of looking at the world. And a fresh way of speaking it.'
William Logan, The New Criterion 'Goodison sheds light on how sharing stories helps us make sense of our world while illuminating the under-explored multitudes that shape it.' Robyn Fadden, Montreal Review of Books 'Mother Muse is a multiple goddess: while the collection sounds like, and oft en is, a rhapsodic celebration centred on brave, gifted and nurturing females,Goodison's idea of the muse is more complex than that.' Carol Rumens, The Poetry Review
'Her female characters spring from the page, speaking in perfect pitch'Martina Evans, Irish Times Books of the Year 2021 '...a major voice in Caribbean poetry' Ben Wilkinson, The Guardian Review Roundup 'A passionate, political collection... Goodison speaks out for future generations' The Poetry Book Society Summer Bulletin 'A Caribbean and international great.' Jeremy Poynting, Managing Editor of Peepal Tree Press, Guardian Best Books of 2017 'The collected works of the recently appointed Jamaican poet laureate is an endlessly moving and rewarding...Four decades of insight and honesty are gathered in some 600 pages of rich, often fabular verse' Financial Times on Collected Poems
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