From Harvey River

Starred review from November 26, 2007
Goodison, an acclaimed poet who received Jamaica’s Musgrave Gold Medal in 1999, makes lyrical exposition sing with dulcet island patois in this homage to her mother, Doris, who grew up in the sleepy Eden-like setting of Harvey River, but raised her own nine children in urban Kingston under less coddled conditions. Starting on a supernal note, in which Doris bequeaths this book to her daughter in a dream, the memoir draws a richly textured portrait of a sprawling, well-to-do family, including seven strong-willed siblings with deftly sketched personas. As “plump and pretty as a ripe ox-heart tomato,†Doris—whose Anglo-African blood attests to Jamaica’s history of interracial dalliance—joins her sisters in the clique of “fabulous Harvey girls,†their surnames trumpeting the family’s landed-gentry status. But it’s a working-class chauffeur—the author’s father—who wins Doris’s hand in marriage. Borne away from her childhood idyll, she takes in her first moving picture, produces a succession of offspring and plies her domestic skills, especially sewing, gamely weathering the vicissitudes of life outside paradise. Steeped in local lore and spiced with infectious dialect and ditties, Goodison’s memoir reaches back over generations to evoke the mythic power of childhood, the magnetic tug of home and the friction between desire and duty that gives life its unexpected jolts.