Hurricane Watch: New and Collected Poems

by Olive Senior

Hurricane New and Collected Poems brings together Jamaican Poet Laureate Olive Senior's first four books of poetry alongside a new collection. Recipient of the Musgrave Gold Medal in 2005 from the Institute of Jamaica, Senior has long been recognised as a skillful and evocative storyteller, but what this book shows is the consistency and range of her achievement. Senior's poems are delicate, formally playful, and always finely observed, whether responding to Jamaican birdlife, the larger natural world, or the traces of a complicated historical inheritance. Often, and always surprisingly, her poems' brilliant descriptions and vivid, gripping narratives open out into ecological reflections, politics, and culture in original, surprising, and sensuous ways.

Genres: Poetry

462 pages, Paperback

Published March 31, 2022

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

[Reece Chaplin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some are funny, some are serious but all are good.

[Paul Vermeersch · Rating 5 out of 5]

A major book by a major poet. Olive Senior should not be overlooked. Her works transcends borders.