Lorna Goodison’s first book of essays can be read as a rough map of her literary peregrinations. A trained painter and copy editor, Goodison is better known as a short story writer and, especially, a celebrated poet. The first female poet laureate of Jamaica and a winner of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, she is a diasporic voice whose best work is steeped in both English literary tradition and Jamaican dialect.
With twenty-seven essays that frequently mix poetry and prose and that range in length from just a few pages to nineteen, Redemption Ground speaks to three main issues: the author’s struggle against the sinister biases of a colonial education, her encounters with racism, and her discovery of a transformative path in life. The first piece is set in the spring of 1972 in London, England, where Goodison and her friend Helen, both “young and swift of gait” and eagerly...
Keith Garebian has published thirty books and five chapbooks, including the poetry collections Three-Way Renegade and, most recently, Stay. He is featured in the third volume of Laurence Hutchman’s In the Writers’ Words.
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