A Study Guide for Lorna Goodison's "The River Mumma Wants Out"


Book Description

A Study Guide for Lorna Goodison's "The River Mumma Wants Out," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.







A Study Guide for Lorna Goodison's "The River Mumma Wants Out"


Book Description

A Study Guide for Lorna Goodison's "The River Mumma Wants Out," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.




Controlling the Silver


Book Description

Renowned poet Lorna Goodison has written a new collection of elegies and praise songs which explore the close link between history and genealogy in the Caribbean experience. Her subjects range from the economic genius of market women to the complex beauty of the natural world.




The Boy from Willow Bend


Book Description

Vere's irrepressible spirit is an asset as he comes of age in Antigua. His is a hard-knocks existence marked by poverty and loss - but he is equally shaped by his family, his first love and island life. Beautifully told, his is the story of a Caribbean boy, trying to hold on to what's real and precious to him while learning to be a man.




Poems at the Edge of Differences


Book Description

This study consists of two parts. The first part offers an overview of feminism's theory of differences. The second part deals with the textual analysis of poems about 'mothering' by women from India, the Caribbean and Africa. Literary criticism has dealt with the representation of 'mothering' in prose texts. The exploration of lyrical texts has not yet come. Since the late 1970s, the acknowledgement of and the commitment to difference has been foundational for feminist theory and activism. This investigation promotes a differentiated, 'locational' feminism (Friedman). The comprehensive theoretical discussion of feminism's different concepts of 'gender', 'race', 'ethnicity' and 'mothering' builds the foundation for the main part: the presentation and analysis of the poems. The issue of 'mothering' foregrounds the communicative aspect of women's experience and wants to bridge the gap between theory and practice. This study, however, does not intend to specify 'mothering' as a universal and unique feminine characteristic. It underlines a metaphorical use and discusses the concepts of 'nurturing', 'maternal practice' and 'social parenthood'. Regarding the extensive material, this study understands itself as an explorative not concluding investigation placed at the intersections of gender studies, postcolonial and classical literary studies. Most of all, it aims at initiating a dialogue and interchange between scholars and students in the Western and the 'Third World'.




Post-Colonial and African American Women's Writing


Book Description

This accessible and unusually wide-ranging book is essential reading for anyone interested in postcolonial and African American women's writing. It provides a valuable gender and culture inflected critical introduction to well established women writers: Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Margaret Atwood, Suniti Namjoshi, Bessie Head, and others from the U.S.A., India, Africa, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and introduces emergent writers from South East Asia, Cyprus and Oceania. Engaging with and clarifying contested critical areas of feminism and the postcolonial; exploring historical background and cultural context, economic, political, and psychoanalytic influences on gendered experience, it provides a cohesive discussion of key issues such as cultural and gendered identity, motherhood, mothertongue, language, relationships, women's economic constraints and sexual politics.




Supplying Salt and Light


Book Description

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.




From Harvey River


Book Description

As read on Radio 4, an irresistibly joyful memoir of mothers and daughters, and the importance of home. Lorna Goodison's family made their home in the Jamaican village to which her great-grandfather gave his name: Harvey River. Her mother Doris was a big-hearted lover of big stories and raised Lorna on tales of their family's - and Jamaica's - history. Gorgeously written with unashamed joy, From Harvey River weaves together memories with island folklore to create a vivid and irresistible story of mothers and daughters, family, and the ties that bind us to home.




Aunt Jen


Book Description

There have been many great and enduring works of literature by Caribbean authors over the last century. The Caribbean Contemporary Classics collection celebrates these deep and vibrant stories, overflowing with life and acute observations about society. Written as a series of letters from the child Sunshine to her absent mother, Aunt Jen traces the changing attitudes of a child entering adulthood as she tries to understand the truth behind her mother's departure, and make sense of her relationship with her family. Aunt Jen migrated to England as part of the Windrush generation, and Sunshine's letters, written in the early 1970s, reveal something of the emotional as well as the physical gulf between those who left and those who remained behind. A companion novel to Letters Home, Aunt Jen is a painfully one-sided correspondence, revealing the complex inheritance we pass on to our children. Suitable for readers aged 14 and above.