Guinea woman - Lorna Goodison

The poetry of Lorna Goodison, Derek Walcott says, 'is a rooted, organic delight, true in its intonations to the Jamaican language she loves, fresh in its wit and pain and in the high, spiritual gossip of its leaves.'

The poet is endowed with all the resources of her two traditions: the African-Caribbean and the European. Her poems are politically illuminating because of the ways in which she celebrates this dual inheritance. Each subject and theme can choose an appropriate idiom. Rooted though the poems may be in certain elected landscapes, the poet is a free agent and finds her inflections in the interplay between languages and occasions.

Goodison is a black Jamaican woman, but none of those sobriquets adequately defines the rare freedoms that her verse earns from speech and from literature. There is an urgency about her subjects and themes - whether landscape, history or personal experience - which is responsible for the music of her verse.