Travelling Mercies - Softcover

Goodison, Lorna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0771033826 ISBN 13: 9780771033827

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart Ltd, 2001

Synopsis

At the heart of acclaimed poet Lorna Goodison's seventh book of poetry - her first published in Canada - is music, moving from a slow ska, a hard rocksteady, and a sweetie-come-brush-me bossanova, to line and sight gratitude psalms, lionheart outlaw anthems, and Miles Davis, blown by the winds to a concert in Berlin. Many of the poems are about those not heard or less counted, those who live in places like the favelas of Rio or the Kingston slum called Moonlight City. Goodison chronicles how "from shameports we passed through whale-belly nights of no return," or from prison through the fields of Tecumseh on a Greyhound bus to Detroit. And she journeys, as they must have, to hell, this time in a marvellous translation of the canto about Brunetto Latini from Dante's Inferno, where she meets Mr. Brown, a Jamaican duppy conqueror from her own land of look behind. Set mainly in her native Jamaica but universal in its concerns, this book, rare and special, is the real thing.

About this title

Review:

"[Goodison is] among the finest poets writing today."
-World Literature Today

"Goodison advances from strength to strength....[She focuses] the diamond lens of her incantatory verse on the culture and people of her homeland in the Caribbean...."
-Booklist (starred review)

"[Goodison's work] continually surprises with its insistently elegant, spiritual core and crystalline intelligence."
-Publishers Weekly

About the Author:

Lorna Goodison is the author of eight books of poetry, including Travelling Mercies, Controlling the Silver, and Goldengrove: New and Selected Poems, two collections of short stories, and an acclaimed memoir, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People. She has received much international recognition, including the Musgrave Gold Medal. Born in Jamaica, Goodison has taught at the University of Toronto and now teaches at the University of Michigan. She divides her time between Ann Arbor and Toronto.

About this edition

• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart Ltd
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0771033826
• ISBN 13: 9780771033827
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96