9 Books Published by Carcanet Press on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

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.

In this collection, acclaimed Jamaican poet Kei Miller dramatizes what happens when one system of knowledge, one method of understanding place and territory, comes up against another. We watch as the cartographer, used to the scientific methods of assuming control over a place by mapping it, is gradually compelled to recognizeeven to envya wholly different understanding of place, as he tries to map his way to the rastaman’s eternal city of Zion. As the book unfolds the cartographer learns that, on this island of roads that “constrict like throats,” every place-name comes freighted with history, and not every place that can be named can be found.

Oracabessa is a book of risky journeys, mappings and re-mappings, as the poet navigates place, history and imagination. Goodison travels to Spain and Portugal, to Canada (’Winter has landed’) and back to the Hope Gardens of her childhood in Jamaica; even to the Old Testament world of Ruth and Hagar. Throughout her journeys she hymns the artists who inspire her: El Greco, John Donne, Billie Holiday, ’Miles Marley Mozart’. At the end of travel, she is, as she says, ’Still on the road to Heartease’.

Exploring the relationship between poetry and song, the pieces in this collection work to define the elemental human struggles of good versus evil and light against darkness. The poems take different shapesnewly forged dictionary definitions; praise-songs celebrating the Singerman in a Jamaican road gang; and simple narratives of ghosts, bandits, and other night creaturesand present an accomplished and progressive voice from a new generation of Caribbean writers.

Diverse in theme as well as form, this new collection explodes onto the page with a maturity and dynamism rarely seen in such a young poet. Using language full of unique beauty and charisma, Miller writes everything from love poems to biblical chronicles, exploring themes such as conflicting identity, home and family, and the spirit of his Jamaican ancestors.

Showcasing a diverse selection of new poetry from eight Caribbean poets, this anthology offers fresh perspectives from emerging and newly established poets who are forging a new and multifarious identity for Caribbean poetry. Including poets from Jamaica, the Bahamas, Barbados, St. Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago, and elsewhere, this is a lively overview of the Caribbean poetry scene’s most original new voices.

New poems and works from three previous collections come together in this exploration of self and society by distinguished West Indian poet Mervyn Morris. Characterized by economy, wit, and elegant use of both standard English and Jamaican Creole, these verses pinpoint moments of choice while exploring the themes of love, lust, time, memory, death, religion, politics, history, and art.

Lorna Goodison is endowed with the resources of her traditions: the Afro-Caribbean and the European. Her poems are politically illuminating because of the ways in which she celebrates this dual inheritance, how each subject and theme can choose an appropriate idiom. Rooted though the poems are in certain elected landscapes, the poet finds her inflections in the interplay between languages and occasions.