Supplying Salt and Light: Poems

by Lorna Goodison

This stunning new book of poems from internationally renowned poet Lorna Goodison opens in Spain and Portugal, conjuring up a new history of the Caribbean and a new way of setting up its heritage.

     The title sets the tone for poems about backgrounds and outlines and shadows and sources of light. This extraordinary book—"a wide lotus on the dark waters of song"—is filled with surprises at every turn, as a Moorish mosque becomes a cathedral in Seville, a country girl dresses in Sunday clothes to visit a Jamaican bookmobile, and a bear appears suddenly, only to slip away silently into the trees on a road in British Columbia. The heartache of Billy Holliday singing the blues, the burden of Charlie Chaplin tramping the banana walks of Jamaica's Golden Cloud, and the paintings of El Greco, the quintessential stranger, come together on the poet's pilgrimage to Heartease, guided by a limping angel and inspired by the passage-making of Dante; the book ends with a superb version of the first of his cantos, translated into the poet's Jamaican language and landscape with the gift of love.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Lorna Goodison was born in Jamaica, and has won numerous awards for her writing in both poetry and prose, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Musgrave Gold Medal from Jamaica, the Henry Russel Award for Exceptional Creative Work from the University of Michigan, and one of Canada’s largest literary prizes, the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction for From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People (2007). Her work has been included in the major anthologies and collections of contemporary poetry over the past twenty-five years, such as the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, the Harper Collins World Reader, the Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry, the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, and Longman Masters of British Literature.

Along with her award winning memoir, she has published three collections of short stories (including By Love Possessed, 2011) and nine collections of poetry.

Her work has been translated into many languages, and she has been a central figure at literary festivals throughout the world. Lorna Goodison teaches at the University of Michigan, where she is the Lemuel A. Johnson Professor of English and African and Afro American Studies.

Reviews

[Magdelanye · Rating 4 out of 5]

A half-remembered Taino legend claims the two figures split from one rock
were once blood sisters
in a cave hiding out....

I like to imagine the two could have
been me and my sister

in past times when she and I in loving tendermercy kept company
each to each supplying salt and light's
vital support.

from the poem The Two Sisters Cave p89

Lorna Goodison is a wordmaster, calling up fresh meaning and her own arrangements. Her way with words sometimes left me trailing, scrambling after her expert picking out a way through the rocky, overgrown terrain. She evokes old legends and old masters and creates new ways to appreciate their lessons.

Diagnosis for dis-ease in the head:
separation from ones life rhythm....

summon the drummers in, arrange them
in a circle around the one who has lost it.

The drums beat out a range of rhythms
............beat, repeat

till the patient catches it,
opens mouth, swallows
Beat enters system...
resets rhythm gone off at pulse points.

The entire village joins in a dance
with the one who was lost but found again
their one and own rhythm.
from the poem The Cure p37

I like to imagine a drum circle, circling the world. Aligned to the cosmic heartbeat, surely we could overcome our prideful tendencies.

What do you want from me? All I desired
Was a quiet life grafting poems onto roses
singing slow at home near blue mountains.
from the poem Bookmarks for Eyes p12

longing for directions. Please tell me why
and what more do you want of me, Song?
from the poem Not Sadness p15

[Jean · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first reading is to get a feel for the poetry and its language.
The remaining readings (infinite times) will be to savor and seep deeply into its language.

[James F · Rating 4 out of 5]

The third Jamaican poet I have read this year, after Claude McKay and Kei Miller, and the first contemporary woman poet I have read in a long time; compared to the McKay and Miller poetry, hers at least in this collection is much more personal and less objective, less explicitly political. It's still excellent and I'm glad to have read it.

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Missing Lorna Goodison today, and appreciating what her books have taught me, not least about ideas of home, and how that shapes what we write.

Here's a short thing I wrote about this book:

https://annarborobserver.com/articles...

[Carrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interlacing a surprising cast of characters—from the Virgin Mary and explorer Don Cristobal, to the musician Miles Davis and runner Usain Bolt—Lorna Goodison’s poems settle with ease in Spain, Portugal, a Jamaican bookmobile, a Toronto Street, always in quest of the existential state of Heartease. Goodison pairs musicality and comfortable syntax with specificity, which makes the emotional arc of Supplying Salt Light alluring and convincing. Poems like her last in the collection, “Canto I,” dedicated to her fellow Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, capture the struggle for understanding the complexities of place, people, and history while pressing away from or toward the divine.

[Jules · Rating 4 out of 5]

Goodison dedicates her collection to Derek Walcott and what a gathering of verse it is. She has a global vision: she takes the reader to Spain, Don Cristobal at Queen Isabella's feet, also to a cafe in Paris that James Baldwin and Richard Wright frequented - journeying from Portugal to Africa and to her homeland of Jamaica, or capturing Charlie Chaplin as he looks out at the Caribbean Sea. The work is unified by a spiritual backdrop, a religious longing such as the kind seen in Teresa of Avila, the beauty and surrender of the Black Madonna.

[Natashya KitchenPuppies · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lorna weaves her Caribbean history and roots into her story and invites us to see through her eyes. It's a wonderful journey.

See my full review here - http://livinginthekitchenwithpuppies....

[Kristen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Supplying Salt and Light, despite its lyric beauty, was like a maze - chock full of references and sometimes cryptic language that made many of the poems feel like puzzles. My poetic sensibilities lean more towards clarity, but I know many would find pleasure in the collection's layered intertextuality.

Notwithstanding, Goodison's voice has a healing and resonant quality that reverberates through all her poetry, even at its most dense, which made this collection worth reading to the end. She is truly a poet for me that always feels like home.

[Marissa and her goodreads spam · Rating 3 out of 5]

hmm i don’t think i understood most of these. i was looking for style and word choice very similar to derek walcotts, but this collection of poems just made me love walcott even more. maybe they went over my head. i’ll have to reread when i have a better brain for poetry…

poems stood out: ‘Bookmarks for Eyes’, ‘In a Dream My Mother Says’, ‘Sintra’s Glorious Eden, After Lord Byron’, ‘Postcards to Miles’, ‘Spinning in the Head’, ‘Tagore on the Bookmobile’, ‘Dance Card’, ‘The Bear’, ‘Canto I’

[World Literature Today]

"At their best, Lorna Goodison’s poems observe the unsavory in history and society even as they guide us firmly toward sources of redemption. With compassion and empathy, Goodison writes about human failure and triumph in large and small measures." - Jim Hannan, Le Moyne College

This book was reviewed in the May 2014 issue of World Literature Today. Read the full review by visiting our website: http://bit.ly/1lLQgpk

[Charlotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is this Lorna's best book yet? Possibly. It's so so lovely and complex and beautiful.

[Betty · Rating 5 out of 5]

This poetry collection is very similar to Goodison's Oracabessa. In comparison of the two Table of Contents, the poems' titles are the same except for Oracabessa's extra chapter. The Poet Laureate of Jamaica Mervyn Morris on YouTube notes the spirituality of Goodison's poetry and her 'seamless' sliding between Standard English and Jamaican Patwah. My own reading of this volume a few times notes that Goodison brings a sacredness to the content. And, in the last poem "Canto I", she adapts Dante's Canto I of "Inferno", the story in which a climber on the way to the summit meets dangerous animals, whereupon Virgil the guide materializes, advising a circuitous route through hell to the mountaintop. Goodison's spirituality sometimes turns to youths' memories for being eager to dance through Saturday nights and for recalling singing celebrities of the '50s-'60s. Other of her poems evoke experiences distinctive to the Caribbean, North America, and elsewhere -- people, environment, history, art, and culture.