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Lorna Goodison, Turn Thanks

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TURN THANKS, Lorna Goodison. University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1999, 95 pages, $15.95 paper, https://www.press.uillinois.edu.

The first two sections here (of four) are stories set into lines—stories of her family and gratitude, too. You kind of have to enter them with an open mind. And when you do, the wealth of images and playfulness of the language begin to find you.

Several poems celebrate place rather than ancestry. A poem ultimately about Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean begins: “There is a perfume rising off the sea today. / A scent of almond top notes and base notes of ambergris”; and culminates:

I think about Columbus and how he thought at first

these islands would be a source of gold,
of cotton and mastic, aloes, wood, and things invaluable

to him, poor thing. That sweet smell rising off the sea today.
May the perfumed tides wash my people now bright berries.

It’s clear what the better bounty is—a landscape and seascape rich in sights and scents, plenty, for those able to value it.

And then there’s the section, “The Mango of Poetry,” which addresses a number of poets, including Yeats and Akhmatova, and artists, too. Another sort of ancestry. (My attempts to categorize this book keep falling apart.) In the last section, “God a Me,” lyrical poems abound.

The poem I’m sharing is my favorite in the collection, the first in the book, and the first in an unnumbered sequence of three poems for her mother.

After the Green Gown of My Mother Gone Down

August, her large heart slows down then stops.
Fall now, and trees flame, catch a fire and riot

last leaves in scarlet and gold fever burning.
Remember when you heard Bob Marley hymn

“Redemption Song,” and from his tone and timbre
you sensed him traveling? He had sent the band home

and was just keeping himself company, cooling star,
sad rudeboy fretting on cowboy box guitar

in a studio with stray echo and wailing sound
lost singing scatting through the door of no return.

When the green goes, beloved, the secret is opened.
The breath falls still, the life covenant is broken.

Dress my mother’s cold body in a deep green gown.
Catch a fire and let fall and flame time come

after the green gown of my mother gone down.

—Lorna Goodison

Turn Thanks returns gratitude even for hatred and ill-use. These poems reminded me to be grateful for the wild woman who shows up, uninvited, “disheveled and weeping.” Who knows from where the next line will come?

To read more about Goodison, see my previous post, or go to Poetry Foundation.

Lorna Goodison (b. 1947)

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Very likely it’s because I have a bad case of “want-to-escape-this-life-itis” (or maybe it’s just this news cycle), but lately, everywhere I look, I see poems about alternate lives.

One that keeps surfacing is a poem from Hold Fast, “Approaching 52,” in which Holly J. Hughes imagines a self realizing “she’ll never be a lion-tamer, tall hat and curling whip,” and it’s “too late for Jacques Cousteau,” or “a wildlife photographer….” Except in dreams — and in the poem.

Along this line of thought, I recently ordered a couple of books by the Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison, purely based on an On Being broadcast that put me entirely under her spell. Here is a somewhat unassuming poem from her book, Turn Thanks:

Domestic Incense

Just then, in that early afternoon,
I wanted to be that simple woman
who had cooked you Saturday soup

using all golden foods. Bellywoman
pumpkin, yellow yams, sweet potato,
carrots and deep ivory bones of beef.

I would bear it to you in an enamel bowl,
the smell of fragrant thyme and pimento
would waft, domestic incense, as I go.

How the hot Scotch Bonnet pepper
would issue its flavor through
the ripened walls of its own skin

but because like our love its seeds
can scorch, I’d be careful to remove it
before it cooked itself into breaking.

—Lorna Goodison, from Turn Thanks (University of Illinois Press, 1999)

And, really, how lovely in a world of war and contagion, that there is still soup — and poets to recall us, if not to our ideal selves, then somewhere else.

So, if I have an assignment for you this week, it’s just this. Maybe you’re entirely satisfied with your life, but if you — for a few hours — could be someone else (Lion Tamer or Soup Maker), what would that someone be?

Lorna Goodison