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Lorna Goodison was born in Jamaica and divides her time between there and the USA, where she’s an Assistant Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing.

     Guinea Woman is shamanistic griot singing blended with the European tradition. (In Guinea a griot is a member of an hereditary caste which keeps and sings the oral history of the tribe.)

     She asks Mr Wordsworth if he noticed her great-grandmother, who also lived in Westmoreland. The lady couldn’t read or write and didn’t buy stamps, but she “wrote her lyrical ballads on air,/ scripted them with her tongue/ then summoned them to return in her book of memory’. She chanted them. “Only Keat’s nightingale could compete with her guinea griot style”. Now they’re both in the spirit world, Mr Wordsworth is asked to tell her greatgrandmother that her great-grand-daughter has collected up the poems and written them down.

     She thinks a good definition of poetry is that it’s like eating mangoes – if you do it slowly and sensuously, getting stained with it, and remembering who planted it (in her case her father). On harvest Sunday she hears “We plough the fields and scatter” but goes down to the shore and finds a short immortality ode in the children playing on the shore and the waves saying “the only thing which lasts/ is something that the eye cannot see”. And in Rio de Janeiro, thinking of all the great oceans “where our ancestors drowned”, she concludes:

There is a spirit nation
under the ocean. May its citizens plead
for our recovery and redemption.

Midnight at the close of this year,
ancestral spirits urge us
to entrust our sorrows to the sea.

     She writes mostly in standard English, occasionally a bit too standard as above, but can slip easily into Jamaican English and can speak like a voodoo priestess, addressing “seraph mine”, or God -like a lover, or is it a lover like a God? He calls like “thoughtful Sunday afternoon rain” and permeates everything, the opinions, pepper, pimento oil and vinegar of our actual world. A man of thirty saw Gods’ face on the surface of a brackish pond, and light creamed the rotting leaves. As a result “the salt-sullen water rose clear”. In one poem a girl discovers, when her tiger’s-eye ring is stolen, that she has a tiger sleeping inside her, now waking up; but she is guided by Rilke “who recommended that, if the business of drinking/ should become too bitter/ one should change oneself into wine”. Goodison herself seems to be a mixture of seasalt, honey and wine.