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Goldengrove: New and Selected PoemsLorna Goodison![]() 10% off
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (104 pages) (Pub. Aug 2006) 9781857548488 £9.95 £8.96
We will crouch down then in a red earth
hollow, press our lips close to the heart of this deep Cockpit Country and call out please don't change or change if you must just change slow. Old countryman riding jackass, big woman watering the dry peas, fat cow, and mawga dog, one-room dwelling with intricate carved lace fretwork eaves. Heaped yam hills, garlands of green vines, cockades of bamboo on crown of the hillside. Little bit of country village place or woodland name of Content, Wire Fence, Stetin, Allsides, far from domain of gunman and town strife. Country we leave from to go and make life. 'Change If You Must Just Change Slow' by Lorna Goodison
Lorna Goodison's Goldengrove is a rich and varied selection of poems from Travelling Mercies (2001) and Controlling the Silver (2004), together with twenty new, previously unpublished, poems. This is a gathering from a poet at the height of her powers.
Moving seamlessly between standard English and the speech of her guinea woman grandmother, and between story and song, Goodison brings dignity to the everyday and grace to all our experiences. Derek Walcott refers to Goodison's latest poems as 'a triumph of fusions' and asks, 'What is the rare quality that has gone out of poetry that these marvellous poems restore? Joy.'
New Poems
Balm I Come From a Land On Leaving Goldengrove: A letter and seven notes... Fall Away Iron Filings Where I Come From In Dreams of Shipwreck The Selfishness of Salmon Naming of Flowers To the Buddha Go the Roses Gates of Ivory, Gates of Horn The Lion and the Gypsy Revisited Silence Before Speech Yet Once More I Will Shake Rock of Ages The Cruel Room What Happened to Peter Giovanni Paulo Abraham and Isaac After A Praise Song to Mandiba and the Camphor Trees of Vergelegen Windrush Sankey from Travelling Mercies Spending the Gold of Lovers Travelling Mercies What We Carried That Carried Us The Living Converter Woman of Green Island Never Expect Book Was It Legba She Met Outside the Coronation Market? Moonlight City Run Greyhound Brunette Latini To the heirs of low bequests to harvest and glean... For Love of Marpessa Dawn Miles in Berlin The Garden of St. Michael in the Sevel-Hilled City of Bamberg I am weary of all winters mother Invitations From Heathcliff Poor Mrs. Lot Natal Song Over the Island of Salt Song of the Scapegoat Shining One To Absorb the Green Medicine Bundle of a Blackfoot Woman Her body became a containter for stars Studio I: Brother Everald Brown Studio II: Seymour L. Studio III: Petrona Morrison Studio IV: Barrington Watson Cézanne After Émile Zola Prises in Papine Market Crossover Griot Petition to the Magdalen Iron Shirt My Island Like a Swimming Turtle Questions for Marcus Mosiah Garvey Lush Bam Chi Chi Lala from Controlling the Silver Island Aubade Dear Cousin Excavating Ode to the Watchman Our Ancestral Dwellings The Wandering Jew and the Arab Merchant on the Island of Allspice Passing the Grace Vessels of Calabash So Who Was the Mother of Jamaican Art? Jah the Baptist Poison Crab Fool-Fool Rose is Leaving Labor-in-Vain Savannah Rainstorm is Weeping: An Arawak Folk Tale Revisited Aunt Alberta Aunt Rose The Burden Bearer Hosay Creation Story: Why Our Island is Shaped Like a Turtle These Three Butterflies and One Bird We Interpret as Signs Don C and the Goldman Posse Where the Flora of Our Village Came From By the Light of a Jamaican Moon Lessons Learned from the Royal Primer Hirfa of Egypt What of Tuktoo the Little Eskimo? Arctic, Antarctic, Atlantic, Pacific, Indian Ocean Louis Galdy of the World's Once Wickedest City Black Like This? River Mumma The Wisdom of Cousin Fool-Fool Rose In the Field of Broken Pots But I May Be Reborn as Keke Change If You Must Just Change Slow The Yard Man: An Election Poem Controlling the Silver Making Life Your Ice Art, Michigan Broadview Missing the Goat The Crying Philosopher and the Laughing Philosopher Hard Food Rites Aunt Ann The Liberator Speaks At the Keswick Museum Bam Chi Chi La La: London, 1969 Apollo Double Bill Guernica I Buy My Son a Reed I Saw Charles Mingus
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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