I would need Lorna Goodison’s skill to make mere words say enough about her immense contribution to Caribbean literature. From her first collection of poetry, Tamarind Season, published in 1980, to her just-now released Dante’s Inferno: A New Translation, Goodison has gifted us nearly five decades’ worth of the “wicked force” of her writings. In addition to fourteen collections of poetry, she has also published four collections of prose and the powerful 2007 memoir, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island.1 She is also an accomplished visual artist (the covers of her poetry collections often feature her work). Her skill as a painter is immediately evident in her poetry, with lines that make you pause to picture the scene she depicts or to marvel at how she manages to not only capture a particular feeling but also reach beyond the page to envelop you in emotion. She is what Linton Kwesi Johnson calls a “tap-natch poet.”2 Her artistry is melodious, at times reflective, always lyrical, and yet simultaneously concrete. Across her career, she has written eloquently and elegantly about love, family, and place, particularly her home country of Jamaica.
Goodison’s work has garnered international recognition and prizes. Her second poetry collection, I Am Becoming My Mother won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1986; From Harvey River won the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction in 2008; and her twelfth poetry collection, Oracabessa, was selected as winner of the poetry category for the 2014 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.3 The latter years of the last decade were especially significant as Goodison was showered with three major honors: in 2017, she was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica; in 2018, she was selected for a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize; and in 2019 she was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.
But her impressive list of awards has not been accompanied by the wealth of critical attention to her work that many of her male counterparts have received. In a 2013 blog post titled “An Appreciation of Lorna Goodison,” Kei Miller speculates that this may be because of Goodison’s “practice of letting the work speak for itself.” That is, she rarely writes about her work—or others’ work—in reflective or critical prose. Miller goes on to conclude, “In some ways this is unfortunate for though she has emerged as a major force in World Literature, I suspect she still isn’t as celebrated as she really ought to be because there simply doesn’t exist the perfect critical language to talk about what she is doing, the risks she is taking, and why exactly they succeed.” Miller’s focus in this post, published by Carcanet Press on the occasion of Goodison’s Oracabessa, is not to offer this perfect critical language but to make clear Goodison’s “most profound and foundational” influence on his own work (he was then on the brink of publishing The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, also with Carcanet Press).4
It is my hope that the pieces gathered here in honor of Lorna Goodison’s gifts add not only to the critical language that has developed to “talk about what she is doing” but also to the recognition of her “profound and foundational” influence on many of our Caribbean writers and cultural producers today. The included essays, interview, and poetry have been chosen to shine light on different facets of Goodison’s work. Elizabeth Coggeshall traces Goodison’s long-running fascination with Dante’s Divine Comedy, just in time for the release of Goodison’s most recent publication, which Coggeshall calls a “tradaptation” of Dante’s Inferno. Essah Díaz singles out another of Goodison’s signature fascinations—mothers, motherhood, her mother—as giving writers like Díaz herself the freedom to embrace the potential power that lies in the maternal. Revealing even more of the hidden influences of Goodison’s gifts, Fabian M. Thomas reflects on a personal interaction that reverberated throughout his creative life, leading him to mount several performances of Goodison’s work. And in her interview with Goodison, Kellie Magnus focuses on Goodison’s tenure as Poet Laureate of Jamaica (from 2017 to 2020), during which she initiated the much-praised All Flowers Are Roses summer series, a poetry writing and self-defense program for young girls, via the National Library of Jamaica. Closing out this special issue, two poets—Amílcar Sanatan and John Robert Lee—demonstrate the breadth and subtlety of Goodison’s continued influence.
In reading Sanatan’s and Lee’s poems, I am reminded of Kei Miller revealing that Goodison’s writing “completely rewired [him] as poet,” and in time, she became “a kind of ‘mother’ over [his] craft.”5 And I wonder at the resistance that Goodison has spoken about having toward poetry in the beginning. In an oft-quoted interview from 1985, Goodison admits, “I’m a poet, but I didn’t choose poetry—it chose me. . . . It’s a dominating, intrusive tyrant. It’s something I have to do—a wicked force.”6 And in a 1992 conversation with Kamau Brathwaite, she explains further: “I . . . was a little wary somewhere in the back of my mind that if I really sort of surrendered to poetry, that it would take me to places that would be very difficult. So I resisted the business of being a poet for as long as I could.”7 Can you imagine the loss for the Caribbean literary landscape if Goodison had continued publishing only a poem here and there, anonymously, and also burning the rest of her writings as she did before accepting the risks of her gift with words? Fortunately, Goodison was not able to resist for long. And what the pieces gathered here illustrate are the multidimensional ways in which we, readers and writers alike, continue to benefit from her surrender to poetry and her ongoing commitment to writing both the beauty and the pain of everyday life in the Caribbean.
Kelly Baker Josephs is a professor of English and digital humanities at the University of Miami. She is the author of Disturbers of the Peace: Representations of Insanity in Anglophone Caribbean Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2013) and a coeditor of The Digital Black Atlantic (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). She is the editor of Manchineel + Seagrape, which publishes open-access digital editions of Caribbean plays.
[1] Lorna Goodison, Tamarind Season: Poems (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1980); Dante’s Inferno: A New Translation (Manchester: Carcanet Classics, 2025); and From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2007).
[2] Linton Kwesi Johnson, “If I Woz a Tap-Natch Poet,” Poetry Archive, https://poetryarchive.org/poem/if-i-woz-tap-natch-poet/.
[3] Lorna Goodson, I Am Becoming My Mother (London: New Beacon Books, 1986); and Oracabessa (Manchester: Carcanet, 2013).
[4] Kei Miller, “An Appreciation of Lorna Goodison,” Carcanet Blog, 15 November 2013, http://carcanetblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/kei-miller-appreciation-of-lorna.html.
[5] Miller, “An Appreciation of Lorna Goodison.”
[6] Lorna Goodison, quoted in Victoria Brittain, “Third World Review (Poetry): Rooted in Reality / Profile of Lorna Goodison, Caribbean Poet,” Guardian, 22 March 1985.
[7] Lorna Goodison, quoted in “Caribbean Writers and Their Art: Lorna Goodison Interviewed by Kamau Brathwaite (1992),” Caribbean Writers Summer Institute Archival Video Collection, University of Miami Digital Collections, https://umiami.mediaspace.kaltura.com/media/Caribbean+Writers+and+Their+Art%3A+Lorna+Goodison+interviewed+by+Kamau+Brathwaite+%281992%29/0_ucka634p/87964161.