Pandemic Poems: First Wave

by Olive Senior

Early in the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, Olive Senior began posting her series of Pandemic Poems on social media. The project was a way of bearing witness to the strangeness of it all and forging a reassuring connection with readers. Each poem is a riff on a word or phrase trending in the first wave of the pandemic - an A to Z of the lexicon newly coined or quickly repurposed for our historic moment. By presenting these words and phrases in sequence, Senior offers a timeline of the way events unfolded and how the language and preoccupations kept changing in response. In this accessible collection, Senior captures the zeitgeist of 2020.



"Generations to come will read these poems and chart the shifts we've been making or not making as a global community linked by a singular virus bearing multiple challenges. We've needed these poems, and we continue to ever more."-Faizal Deen, author of The Greatest Films

"Olive Senior's Pandemic Poems invite, seduce and require us to think and feel in new ways about the intersecting crises of this terrible year. I was moved to laughter, to weeping, and to silence by these poems. They are essential reading."-Rachel L. Mordecai, author of Citizenship under The 1970s in Jamaican Literature and Culture

"In Pandemic Poems, Olive Senior captures the sense of dread that has affected us since the virus has crept into our lives. . . . Senior transforms seemingly mundane events into meditations on mortality. Pandemic Poems offers a much-needed respite from the deluge of data that surrounds us and provides moments to pause and, perhaps, find peace."-Geoffrey Philp, author of Garvey's Ghost

Genres: Poetry

86 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 1, 2021

About the author

Olive Senior was born and brought up in Jamaica in 1941 and educated in Jamaica and Canada. She is a graduate of Montego Bay High School and Carleton University, Ottawa.

She is one of Canada's most internationally recognized and acclaimed writers having left Jamaica in 1989, spending some years in Europe and since 1993 being based in Toronto.

Among her many awards and honours she has won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and F.G. Bressani Literary Prize, was nominated for a Governor-General’s Literary Award, and was runner up for the Casa de Las Americas Prize and the Pat Lowther Award. In 2003, she received the Norman Washington Manley Foundation Award for Excellence (preservation of cultural heritage – Jamaica). Her body of published work includes four books of poetry, three collections of short stories and several award-winning non-fiction works on Caribbean culture.

Reviews

[lauraღ · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is about learning to read again: the naked face indoors, the masked face without.

Good, but as someone who's read better from Senior, I'm left a little disappointed. These are poems that she wrote during the pandemic, about the pandemic, and they're all exceedingly simple and kind of dry? Not that simple and dry are qualities that automatically preclude poetry from being good. From what I remember, (and to be fair it's been a while since I studied her at uni) in some of the poems I like best from Senior, she doesn't use particularly elevated or flowery language; it's the simplicity that makes them work. But these were mostly just kinda surface-level. Insightful, yes, and I love that she looked at not only the pandemic and it's attendant social tragedies, but also events that happened during the pandemic, like George Floyd's murder and a few ecological issues. It's just that they were so matter-of-fact. A lot of the time I felt like I was reading short articles, rather than poetry. Some of my disappointment is also because I admittedly forgot that Senior now lives in Canada. When I picked this up, I was expected to get poems about the pandemic from a Caribbean perspective, and this... wasn't that.

Still! This was effective in what it set out to do and there were a couple striking lines that made me catch my breath. Just in terms of commentary, there's a lot to be gained here.

[RK · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some really good lines. Very relatable.

[Chantel DaCosta · Rating 3 out of 5]

More of 3.5 stars. A solid collection that will forever hold for us all that we went through in 2020.
In the Book Riot Read Harder Challenge 2023 this is a book by a local author. I know Olive Senior is technically based in Canada but I consider her to be a Jamaican poet. She is Poet Laureate of Jamaica.

[Gary Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

An effective capturing of a significant slice of modern history. Well done Olive!

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really great collection!! I want to re-read this in like 5 years to see how I feel looking back on the earlier part of the pandemic (when it's not so fresh in my mind).