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Renowned poet Lorna Goodison has written a new collection of elegies and praise songs which explore the close link between history and genealogy in the Caribbean experience. Her subjects range from the economic genius of market women to the complex beauty of the natural world.
 

A selection of poems by Lorna Goodison, who in 2017 was named Poet Laureate of Jamaica.

Writing in The Hudson Review,
        David Mason has characterized Lorna Goodison's work as a "revelation
        to me, much of it beautiful for its simple negotiation of the line between
        life and art."
      One of the most distinguished
        contemporary poets of the Caribbean, Goodison draws on both African and
        European inheritances in her finely crafted poems, which often carry a
        sense of language's healing power in the face of the pain of the past.
        She deals thematically with the struggle of Caribbean women and writes
        in a fashion that has developed from conversational to more ritualistic.
      From reviews of Goodison's
        earlier works:
      "The evocative power
        of Lorna Goodison's poetry derives its urgency and appeal from the heart-and-mind
        concerns she has for language, history, racial identity, and gender."
        Andrew Salkey -- World Literature Today
      "A marvelous poet, one
        to savor and to chant aloud."
        -- Pat Monaghan, Booklist
 

The lyric energy, compassion, humor, and tenderness that characterize Lorna Goodison's work are once again in evidence in Turn Thanks, her seventh collection. Here the Jamaican poet turns to acknowledge her own ancestors and those of her craft: mother and father, aunts and uncles, Africa, William Wordsworth, Vincent Van Gogh, the Wild Woman. "Whether you will receive this letter or not I cannot tell," she writes. "Still, I intend to send it . . . "