Under the Breadfruit Tree: Island Poems

by Monica Gunning, Fabricio Vanden Boeck (Illustrator )

As in her award-winning Not a Copper Penny in Me House, Monica Gunning brings young readers back to the Jamaica of her childhood. The poems present intimate portraits of family and friends, as children see them in happy times and sad times. There are lively characters in moments both poignant and comical, such as Aunt Mae and her breadfruit trees, Stella-Sue walking like a ballerina to market, and Hilda the higgler, selling her spicy pies. Here is a book filled with the sights, smells, and sounds of the island, and illustrated with simple yet stunning scratchboard artwork by Fabricio Vanden Broeck.

Genres: Poetry

48 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1998

Reviews

[Manybooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lyrically enchanting, wonderfully OwnVoices, sometimes joyful but also at times heartbreaking, and truly a real and sweetly textured slice of author Monica Gunning's Jamaican childhood, particular my inner child has absolutely textually adored how Gunning's verses in Under the Breadfruit Tree: Island Poems are both realistic and also full of beauty and imagination. But wonderfully, even when Gunning is telling stories of poverty and of sudden death, her Under the Breadfruit Tree: Island Poems sings out with and ever-present feeling against despair, so that when I am for example reading in Under the Breadfruit Tree about Monica's best friend Connie dying suddenly and that she, that Monica Gunning herself was obviously abandoned by her parents and raised by her grandparents, while there of course is featured textual sadness in Under the Breadfruit Tree: Island Poems, there is also and in each and every of the featured pieces of poetry graceful joy and an appreciation of simple Jamaican pleasures such as breadfruit, family togetherness, and how poverty also does not have to be all encompassing and devastating if communities work together, namely that trading favours, providing necessities to one another becomes a circle of good deeds and a loving and cherished in memory and nostalgia Jamaican childhood for Monica Gunning.

Now with regard to Fabricio Vanden Broeck's artwork for Under the Breadfruit Tree: Island Poems (and yes, each of Monica Gunning's poems does have an accompanying illustration), well, my adult reading self certainly appreciates the artistic talent and expressivity of Vanden Boeck's black and white woodcut-like pictures. However, my inner child really and truly does want a trifle more colour (and in particular yellows, blues and greens), and with the result being that aesthetically both of us (both my inner child and my adult self) do heartily agree that Fabricio Vanden Boeck's artwork for Under the Breadfruit Tree: Island Poems is visually decent and provides a rather nice mirror to and for Monica Gunning's Jamaican childhood themed poetry, but that the lack of colour in the artwork is not only just a wee bit annoying and frustrating but also kind of makes the poems themselves feel a bit paler and lacking in intensity (at least I have found this to be the case if or when I try to concentrate on Vanden Boeck's illustrations for Under the Breadfruit Tree: Island Poems with an equal intensity as on the written words, as on Gunning's featured and presented Jamaican based verses).

[Elayna Gilbert · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this book was very engaging. I learned a lot about the Jamaican culture. A collection of poems about people and places that were part of the author's childhood in Jamaica is expressed in each poem.