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Dante's Inferno

Lorna Goodison

Cover of Dante's Inferno by Lorna Goodison
Categories: 21st Century, BAME, Caribbean, Classical, Translation, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Classics
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (180 pages)
(Due Apr 2025)
9781800174665
£16.99 £15.29
  • Description
  • Author
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • This new Jamaican Dante is as much a transformation as it is translation, by one of the most celebrated Caribbean writers of our time and former Poet Laureate of Jamaica.
    Lorna Goodison was born in Jamaica, and has won numerous awards for her writing in both poetry and prose, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Musgrave Gold Medal from Jamaica, the Henry Russel Award for Exceptional Creative Work from the University of Michigan, and one of Canada’s largest literary prizes, the ... read more
    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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The Carcanet Blog We've Moved! read more Books of the Year read more One Little Room: Peter McDonald read more Collected Poems: Mimi Khalvati read more Invisible Dog: Fabio Morbito, translated by Richard Gwyn read more Dante's Purgatorio: Philip Terry read more
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