Paul Breslin
Professor
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL USA

Wordsworth’s Colloquy with Miss Leanna: The Canon and Local Knowledge in Lorna Goodison’s Poetry

My title alludes to Goodison’s poem, “To Mr. William Wordsworth, Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland,” in Turn Thanks. The speaker asks the English poet to tell her departed great-grandmother Leanna that her oral songs and poems “are now written down” (TT, 46). Making playful use of the fact that there is a “Westmoreland” in Jamaica as well as England, she imagines her great-grandmother and the famous poet as neighbors casually meeting in the afterlife, rendered as an egalitarian and intimate social space.

The encounter exemplifies the way the poet confronts the canon with indigenous sources of authority. Much of Goodison’s work is concerned to trace and honor ancestors, especially matrilineal ancestors, as well as cultural icons such as Nanny of the Maroons. In the third section of Turn Thanks, she imagines this familial world and the cultural realm inhabited by European greats Wordsworth, Yeats, Charlotte Bronte, or Van Gogh as adjacent neighborhoods in imaginative dream-space, with easy conversation possible between them. We are used to more ferocious styles of “writing back” to Empire, as in Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea or Césaire’s Une tempête; Goodison’s disarmingly cordial manner implies a confident assumption of equality, while her wit tacitly acknowledges the boldness of her address.

My talk will concentrate on Goodison’s three most recent collections, To Us, All Flowers Are Roses, Turn Thanks, and Travelling Mercies.