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Reading Lorna Goodison's poems is like taking a breath of the "pure serene"-fresh air, Keats might have called it in an unpoetic mood. Born in Jamaica, she writes with such vivid control of description that the pages seem to fall out of paintings by Bosschaert or color plates ripped from Robert Thornton's Temple of Flora:
Keep doing the island's housekeeping.
Scour and rinse out the mouth of a river,
plastic scandal-bag clogged.
You're a pin-up girl in a one-piece bathing suit
I saw you sew yourself; it is ruched and tucked
like a washboard across your belly.
Goodison has learned a few things from Derek Walcott; but her images are intimate with their surroundings, not the wedding-cake decorations favored by the Nobel laureate.
Mother Muse is part elegy for, part celebration of, two Jamaican women, Sister Mary Ignatius, who reformed truant boys, and Margarita Mahfood (Margarita Mahfouz), a local rhumba queen.1 Known as the "nun who nurtured reggae," Sister Iggy produced important local musicians at the Alpha Boys School. (She also taught dominoes and boxing-and was a disc jockey at dances.) According to a bbc article, "If you want to get grown men to cry simply talk to them about her." The opening of the sister's dramatic monologue runs:
They say Portugal is lovely this time of year.
The roofs are clay red and bougainvillea
studies new ways to shimmy and cascade
across tiles and wide wrought iron balconies,
hung over with last night's damp bed linen,
on display as sweat-stained tapestries.
And the sea is a deep dish, silver with sardines,
and long meter waves wash songs of sailors
back to shore as mournas, fado, mournas.
Mahfood, the beloved rhumba queen, was murdered by her lover, Don Drummond, a ska trombonist once a Sister Iggy boy.
Goodison's monologues and praise songs sanctify, not without sorrow, saints of the usual and unusual sort, well-known women like Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson (misspelled "Marion"), and others who might be forgotten: Sandra Bland (who after a traffic stop died in a Texas jail cell, possibly murdered) and a slave named Quasheba. If the poet's concerns are drenched in familiar tropes, they're dead honest and unremitting, even about murder: "Because, she dance half naked./ Because, she give him...