Edward baugh on lorna goodison

Lorna Goodison in the Context of Feminist Criticism.

It is characteristic of Goodison that her dawn poem is a people poem, a ritual of community and responsibility.

Lorna Goodison has spoken recently about a sequence of poems on which she Interview with Edward Baugh.

Edward Baugh, Oscar Wilde · Published · Art.

Lorna Goodison and Edward Baugh at the World Poetry Day Celebration & Award Ceremony hosted by the National Library of Jamaica.

Lorna Goodison has spoken recently about a sequence of poems on which she Interview with Edward Baugh....

Making life

By Edward Baugh

Controlling the Silver, by Lorna Goodison
University of Illinois Press, ISBN 0-252-07212-X, 99 pp

Lorna Goodison.

Photograph courtesy Bernd Böhner

In the poem “Making Life”, Lorna Goodison, who teaches at the University of Michigan, is asked by one of her American students, who meets her on a snowbound street, “Lorna, how can you live in exile?” The student is still flushed with the “afterglow of Negril” at “spring break.” He can’t understand how anyone born into such a paradise could leave it.

The answer begins with what sounds a bit like rationalisation of her personal motive for leaving. But then the poem widens, as the poet considers herself part of the historical journeying and migration of her people, and the main point of the reply is that “we never call ourselves exiles,” even if we never return.

We regard our time abroad as merely a sojourn, and “We see our sojournings as ‘making life’.” No doubt there are exceptions; no doubt ther