Lorna Goodison

Lorna Gaye Goodison (born 1 August 1947) is a poet, essayist and professor from Kingston. She was the Poet Laureate of Jamaica from 2017 until 2020.

• The baby was plump and pretty as a ripe ox-heart tomato. Her mother, Margaret Wilson Harvey, gently squeezed the soft cheeks to open the tiny mouth and rubbed her little finger, which had been dipped in sugar, back and forth, over and under the small tongue to anoint the child with the gift of sweet speech. "Her name is Doris," she said to her husband, David.
  • From Harvey River, first lines of Part 1

• my own memoir is a history of Jamaica; it’s my attempt to show that history happens to real people; how history affects ordinary people. (2013)

• My particular role, as I see it, is to accurately represent my people. I have this real concern about how sometimes Jamaicans, and Caribbean people, are represented. And in my own writing, I want to tell their stories, but I want to do it in such a way that I think accurately portrays them. That’s the only ambition I really have. And if I do that, then I’ve fulfilled my job as a writer. (2013)

• once I started reading, I was taken with the idea of what could happen to you once you read something. I don’t actually remember thinking that I wanted to be a writer, but I remember thinking I wanted to be a part of this world where people put down thoughts on paper, and when you read it back you could feel all of the emotions: you could be sad, you could be happy, you could be repulsed—all of those things. And I knew I wanted to be a part of that world. (2013)

• Jamaicans are very comical people, and laughter is a way of coping with life’s displeasures. Also, when you make something of it [a hard situation], it says that you are in control. There are incidences when we have no control; all we can do is make some sort of a gesture. Sometimes, the world can throw things at you that are so cruel and so devastating that you are in no position to have any kind of real response but to make a gesture. And I think that sometimes laughter is a gesture saying that you have not completely annihilated me; you have not robbed me of my ability to respond as a human being. (2013)

• I think a lot of my poems have been trying to make these gestures, you know, to say 'I'm a human being, and I have some control ... very limited, but some control over myself as a human being.' (2007)

• When all of this is over, I want to have done something that I really think means something to people: something that feeds them in some way, and I'm trying to feed the work in the hope that it can nourish people. (2007)

• You know, the Emily Dickinson litmus test: if I read a poem and I feel so cold as if no fire will ever warm me, or if I feel physically as if I'm losing the top of my head? Most poems can't pass that test, but you read something like 'Ode to a Nightingale', and you do lose the top of your head! Nowadays people seem to want this absolute control over poetry, a kind of domination. I'm not interested in that kind of poetry. I appreciate artistry and virtuosity, but I love it when you just back away from a poem, and think, 'Jesus! Where did that come from?' When you have to admit you have no idea how it got in there. (2007)

• I see myself in a tradition of praise singers. (2004, in Writing across worlds)

book by Kwame Dawes

• I love words, I really love the pleasure and consolation you get from words. Words can be nourishing or medicinal or at their worst, poisonous.

• It's terrific that there are these women writers, Caribbean writers, emerging. They're emerging the same way that the men emerged. It's just their time, nobody can stop it. They are the ones that have to tell the half that has never been told, and they will tell it.

• I believe I started to write because I wanted to read what I was writing. When I was growing up there were no images of me in the literature I read. I didn't see myself or people like me in any of the literature of my youth.

• People should realize that there is not a finite amount of opportunities for writers or for artists, you know. I think if you're good, you're good. I myself have always had the attitude that I just do my work, and I do what I'm doing, and if I am recognized, good. But I'm perfectly willing to just go about my life and if some big things happen, that's wonderful, and if they don't, I am still going to be Lorna Goodison. I will continue to just be myself.

collected in Writing across worlds : contemporary writers talk edited by Susheila Nasta (2004)

• I just love what's happening now; it's like there's a big tapestry and everybody has a corner because everybody has a story to tell.

• ...I never anywhere saw my own point of view. Although it wasn't a conscious effort, I think in the end I needed to read those poems; that's why I wrote them. So, Tamarind Season was just a need to cry out about a lot of things about myself, about other women, about Jamaica, about the world in my own small way.

• ...I didn't think you should approach what your vocation is in any faint-hearted way... or as Rasta would say 'with a weak heart'. So, I wanted to write strong poems as good as the men, but about women's business.

• I think that's what real poetry is...there are all these levels...you can write about what you really feel...You get borrowed and it doesn't have very much to do with you. That's why I think real poetry or the inspiration to write real poetry is a divine thing; it is completely out of your hands. You just happen to be standing there and it passes through you.

• She is solidly located in the trinity of Caribbean writing. It is now, officially, Walcott, Braithwaite and Goodison.
  • Kwame Dawes, part of quote used as blurb for Controlling the Silver: Poems

• Lorna Goodison is an artist as well as a poet. The keeps of her observation, her certain demarcation of shapes, her canny sense of physical and sociological textures are undoubtedly related to that.... The sensibility in Tamarind Season is a woman's...this is the important other half, the perspicacity missing from the current record of the Caribbean.
  • Pamela Mordecai, used as blurb for the book

• Few writers are as attuned as Goodison to the heartache and triumphs of Jamaicans, especially Jamaican women. . . . Fewer writers still tell us so much about what it means to be human.
  • Elizabeth Nunez, quote used as blurb for Love Possessed

• Lorna Goodison's new collection is a triumph of fusions: of the naive wide-eyed delight of her younger poems with their claiming pride of naming everything that is melodiously Jamaican, to a tougher nostalgia that now looks at those things with a benign, unboastful authority. This is what the young Goodison fought for - the confidence of claiming the familiar, of trans-figuring it by the fury of her humility. And what is the rare quality that has gone out of poetry that these marvelous poems restore? Joy.
  • Derek Walcott, quote used as blurb for Controlling the Silver: Poems

• Caribbean Review of Books index to material on Goodison.
• The Poetry Archive page
• Black Women Writers Project page
• Poet Profile at National Library of Jamaica
• Goodreads page