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Travelling Mercies
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Travelling Mercies Paperback - 2001

by Lorna Goodison


From the publisher

At the heart of acclaimed poet Lorna Goodison's seventh book of poetry - her first published in Canada - is music, moving from a slow ska, a hard rocksteady, and a sweetie-come-brush-me bossanova, to line and sight gratitude psalms, lionheart outlaw anthems, and Miles Davis, blown by the winds to a concert in Berlin. Many of the poems are about those not heard or less counted, those who live in places like the favelas of Rio or the Kingston slum called Moonlight City. Goodison chronicles how "from shameports we passed through whale-belly nights of no return," or from prison through the fields of Tecumseh on a Greyhound bus to Detroit. And she journeys, as they must have, to hell, this time in a marvellous translation of the canto about Brunetto Latini from Dante's Inferno, where she meets Mr. Brown, a Jamaican duppy conqueror from her own land of look behind. Set mainly in her native Jamaica but universal in its concerns, this book, rare and special, is the real thing.

Details

  • Title Travelling Mercies
  • Author Lorna Goodison
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition First Printing o
  • Pages 104
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher McClelland & Stewart, Westminster, Maryland, U.S.A.
  • Date 2001-04-17
  • ISBN 9780771033827 / 0771033826
  • Weight 0.31 lbs (0.14 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.47 x 5.39 x 0.29 in (21.51 x 13.69 x 0.74 cm)
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 2001347318
  • Dewey Decimal Code 811.54

Excerpt

POOR MRS. LOT

And so it was that Lot’s hard-ears wife
became a pillar of solid eye water.

Poor woman, frozen there crystalline
up from ground, salt stalagmite.

One last glance at what you left behind:
your mother’s cutlery, your yellow plates.

One more look behind to memorize
the lay, the order of the landscape.

The red water tank. The church spire.
One last look is enough to petrify.

Like you, she should have cried
as she left, not daring to look back,

savouring hard homeground with salt.

Media reviews

“[Goodison is] among the finest poets writing today.”
World Literature Today

“Goodison advances from strength to strength.…[She focuses] the diamond lens of her incantatory verse on the culture and people of her homeland in the Caribbean.…”
Booklist (starred review)

“[Goodison’s work] continually surprises with its insistently elegant, spiritual core and crystalline intelligence.”
Publishers Weekly

About the author

Lorna Goodison is the author of eight books of poetry, including Travelling Mercies, Controlling the Silver, and Goldengrove: New and Selected Poems, two collections of short stories, and an acclaimed memoir, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People. She has received much international recognition, including the Musgrave Gold Medal. Born in Jamaica, Goodison has taught at the University of Toronto and now teaches at the University of Michigan. She divides her time between Ann Arbor and Toronto.
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Travelling Mercies
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Travelling Mercies

by Goodison, Lorna

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ISBN 10 / ISBN 13
9780771033827 / 0771033826
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Travelling Mercies

Travelling Mercies

by Lorna Goodison

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Travelling Mercies
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Travelling Mercies

by Lorna Goodison

  • Used
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ISBN 10 / ISBN 13
9780771033827 / 0771033826
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Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2001. First Edition. Paperback. Very Good/No Dj. 8vo. pp. 96.
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