Supplying Salt And Light

Goodison opens this book of poems in Spain and Portugal, conjuring up a new history of the Caribbean and a new way of setting up its heritage. A Moorish mosque becomes a cathedral in Seville, a country girl dresses in Sunday clothes to visit a Jamaican bookmobile, and a bear appears suddenly, only to slip away silently into the trees on a road in British Columbia. The book ends with a superb version of the first of Dante's cantos, translated into the poet's Jamaican language and landscape with the gift of love.