[In the following review, Dabydeen praises Goodison's lyricism in Turn Thanks.]

Now in her mid-career, Lorna Goodison, born in 1947 in Jamaica, in a key section of her new book Turn Thanks called “The Mango of Poetry,” describes a sensuous attitude to poetry in a poem by the same name: “I would not peel it all back / to reveal its golden entirety, / but I would soften it by rolling / it slowly between my palms.” Further, she considers that this “would be a definition / of what poetry is,” all in her accustomed reflectiveness and meditative quality cast in languorous lines in a collection emphasizing her craft, all in “its golden entirety.” This attitude to poetry was foreshadowed in her first book, Tamarind Season (1980), and was seen in others such as I Am Becoming My Mother (1986) and Heartease (1989). Of Tamarind Season, she would say, “It's a sort of Tagore,” and Heartease is “sort of continuing … my personal continuing journey.” Goodison's training in art—she studied art in Jamaica and New York—also comes into play as we visualize her fingers forming or shaping fruits, whether it is a mango or tamarind, all quintessentially tropical. This section, one of four here, includes acknowledgment of other artists, seen in “Letter to Vincent Van Gogh,” and of poets such as Yeats and Akhmatova, toward truly expressing her personal, continuing journey.

The other sections in the volume are “My Mother's Sea Chanty,” “This Is My Father's Country,” and “And God a Me,” all of which reflect Goodison's unfailing lyricism and unique chord as her imagination explores the various dimensions of family, lore, and tradition in intrinsically Jamaican contexts with her sense of origins and gender always in a place known for its stalwarts, beginning with the Maroons down to modern-day heroes in both matriarchal and patriarchal dimensions. And overall, in Turn Thanks we see a considerable development in Goodison's work, albeit following in the vein of I Am Becoming My Mother, with images and feelings being recast, sometimes in simply looking back to her African roots (e.g., “Africa on the Mind Today”).

Plantation life and family settings associated with domesticity dominate the middle section of the book, as the poet acknowledges her mother Miss Mirry, Grandmother Hannah, Great-Grandmother Leanna, and Uncle, while evoking other images of her mother's village, like a familiar heirloom but without banal sentimentality. And indeed, some of the best poems in Turn Thanks are “The Domestic Science of Sunday Dinner,” “This Is My Father's Country,” and “About Almonds and Ambergris,” reflecting her particular sensibility with a kind of mellowness of tone: the lines often appearing languorous and enhancing her lyricism and simultaneously adding to the accessibility of her voice, as her technique demonstrates.

While there is little of the chiseled phrase one finds, say, in Derek Walcott, the poems with their dialectal rhythmic patterns (cf. “Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry”), combined with enjambment and caesura and diction that are intrinsically Jamaican, accentuate her spirit of calm assurance. Indeed, Turn Thanks does not address social issues, even indirectly, whether Caribbean- or American-based (Goodison spends a fair bit of time in the U.S.), as perhaps seen in the Chicago poet-journalist Patricia Smith in her Close to Death (which I read simultaneously with Turn Thanks). In technique and penchant, Goodison is closer to Rita Dove, preferring feeling to the delineation of past and present experience; and as she says in “Winter Dreams,” “Look no more outside yourself / Sings my heart returning,” making Caribbean writing at its finest with Turn Thanks. Indeed, Goodison could also be among the finest poets writing today.