Collected Poems

The definitive Collected Poems by one of the best-loved poets of the Caribbean, a regular public reader in Britain and Ireland; Ranging from her ground-breaking Tamarind Season through eleven poetry books, and from Jamaica to Canada, Europe and the rest of the world; Winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and Musgrave Medal, Lorna is a inevitably a political and religious poet as well as a poet of place and love; Featured in the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces & Longman Book of British Masters. Lorna Goodison was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica on 17 May 2017 and will serve until 2020.

The Collected Poems (Second Impression) of Jamaica's Poet Laureate (2017-2020) and winner of The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2019.The Collected Poems (Second Impression) of Jamaica's Poet Laureate (2017-2020) and winner of The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2019. Lorna Goodison is a poet alive to places, from the loved and lived-in world of Jamaica where she began and started a family, to the United States and Canada where she has made her teaching career, but always re-connecting with her Caribbean roots. She travels with an ear alert to histories and voices. How differently English sounds in the tropics and in colder lands, at seaside in sunlight and on prairies, mountains and in cities. The same words say quite different things, depending on who speaks them and who's listening, obeying or resisting. She covers a wide range of subjects and themes, too. Her instinct is to celebrate being alive in a world that is rich but in peril. `And what is the rare quality that has gone out of poetry that these marvellous poems restore?' asks Derek Walcott. `Joy.' The `mango of poetry', eaten straight from the tree, Goodison somehow finds growing in Wordsworth country and in Sligo, in Russia and Norway, in Spain and Portugal which spilled their empires into the Caribbean, in Cape Town and Far Rockaway.