Journal Article

Reach to Golden Spring

Morrison, Anthea

2020

Overview

Among major poets of the region who have memorably explored the place of the natural world in Caribbean-and in their own- experience, one might cite Derek Walcott, Aimé Césaire, Kamau Brathwaite, Edouard Glissant, Olive Senior and Mark McWatt (and this list is certainly not exhaustive). Specifically, for both Goodison and McWatt, learning to immerse oneself in river water, to overcome the terror of the unknown so as to confirm a necessary intimacy with one's native land, was a virtual rite of passage in childhood. The article chooses as an epigraph a section of the long poem that makes up Grace Nichols's Startling the Flying Fish (beginning with the words \"Mi dear, times hard / but things lush-lush here\"), the importance of which deCaires Narain underlines by stating that it \"acknowledges the enduring image of the land-as-Eden in Caribbean poetry but it does so with a knowing wariness [...] characteristic of women's poetry\" (41). The latter term, as well as the expression \"Before day morning,\" emblematic of her ability to marry Standard Jamaican English with Creole and with creative neologisms,5 confirms Jahan Ramazani's description of one aspect of Goodison's prodigious gift as \"the suppleness of her poetry's turns between Standard English and Jamaican Creole\" (560): Before day morning, at cockcrow and firstlight, our island is washed by the sea which has been cleaning itself down with foamweed and sponge.

• Publisher: Journal of West Indian Literature
• Subject: African American literature / Allusion / Autobiographies / Brathwaite, Kamau (1930-2020) / Caribbean literature / Creativity / Ecocriticism / Goodison, Lorna / Jamaican Creole / Learning / Literary characters / Literary criticism / Literary devices / Narrative techniques / Neologisms / Poetry / Poets / Publishing / Publishing industry / Rivers / Scholarly / Terrorism / Walcott, Derek / Writers