Next stop Jamaica with award winning poet Lorna Goodison

Commonwealth Poetry Podcast

In this episode Gyles and Aphra Brandreth meet Jamaica’s former poet laureate Lorna Goodison. Recalling her upbringing growing up in a busy home where different influences shaped her voice, she still remembers the poetry she learned by heart as a child, reciting Wordsworth’s I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud from memory. In 1986 she won The Commonwealth Poetry Prize, an experience which she says changed her life. Writing poems about love and poems about justice, in this episode we discover more about Jamaica and hear some of Lorna’s wonderful poetry including: The Road of the Dread; After the Green Gown of My Mother Gone Down (an elegy to her mother); and Guinea Woman, all by Lorna Goodison.