Poet Lorna Goodison finds her writing inspiration at her Halfmoon Bay home and yet her roots are also in Jamaica where she was born. Recently Goodison was named Poet Laureate of Jamaica, and she will continue to spend her time between the two countries. Her links with Canada are strong – they go back to 1930 when members of her family moved to Montreal and where she lived for a time.
Goodison will be installed in her new position during a ceremony at King’s House in St. Andrew, Jamaica on May 17. The National Library of Jamaica, in making the announcement, said Goodison was selected by a secret ballot vote from a pool of publicly nominated persons by the Poet Laureate Committee of the Board of Management. The Poet Laureate is charged with stimulating a greater appreciation for Jamaican poetry and creating avenues for public involvement in poetry. Her tenure as Poet Laureate is for three years and ends in May 2020.
Goodison’s hopes for her role focus on working with children. She recalls that in her school they memorized and recited the works of poets.
“At age eight or nine children are open to receiving all sorts of delicious things,” she said. “It becomes hard-wired. Catch them while they’re young.”
She has authored numerous collections of poetry and short stories, as well as From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People (2007), which won the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction in 2008 and was a finalist for both the Trillium Book Award and the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. Two of her poems were included in an anthology edited on the Sunshine Coast: The Great Black North: Contemporary African Canadian Poetry. Her most recent work, Collected Poems, is published by Carcanet Press, one of the outstanding independent literary publishers in the U.K.
Goodison and her author husband J. Edward Chamberlin travel a lot – she has taught at University of Michigan and he at University of Toronto, but both have found that they are at their most productive when living at their Halfmoon Bay home.
