Supplying Salt and Light

This stunning new book of poems from internationally renowned poet Lorna Goodison opens in Spain and Portugal, conjuring up a new history of the Caribbean and a new way of setting up its heritage.

     The title sets the tone for poems about backgrounds and outlines and shadows and sources of light. This extraordinary book—”a wide lotus on the dark waters of song”—is filled with surprises at every turn, as a Moorish mosque becomes a cathedral in Seville, a country girl dresses in Sunday clothes to visit a Jamaican bookmobile, and a bear appears suddenly, only to slip away silently into the trees on a road in British Columbia. The heartache of Billy Holliday singing the blues, the burden of Charlie Chaplin tramping the banana walks of Jamaica’s Golden Cloud, and the paintings of El Greco, the quintessential stranger, come together on the poet’s pilgrimage to Heartease, guided by a limping angel and inspired by the passage-making of Dante; the book ends with a superb version of the first of his cantos, translated into the poet’s Jamaican language and landscape with the gift of love.