Crown Point

Velma Pollard

ISBN 10: 0948833246 / ISBN 13: 9780948833243

Published by Peepal Tree Press Ltd, GB, 1993

About this Item

Crown Point is the first collection of poems by one of the Caribbean's foremost woman poets. Velma Pollard's poems range from affectionate and observant family portraits to the righteous anger of an Afro-Caribbean woman's truth telling. Crown Point closes with a moving series of poems that meditate on death, mourning and their meaning for the living. They speak both of the deaths of parents and grandparents and of 'deaths falling early' and hear always Anancy's susu susu whispering words, 'tiday fi mi / tumaro fi yu'. These are poems which have a quiet, consoling truthfulness, no answers, just the unvarnished reminder that this is the way of life and that the dead remain with us: 'No one philosophy can answer all / each man is an island / each mind is a muffin tin / and so we sit with our invisible pencils / working out strategies to cope with brevity / to cope with our adieux / to love - too sweet to forget / to life - too intense to leave.' These tender elegiac poems of loss and remembrance have an eloquent stillness at their heart. All share a common depth of reflection and concern with poetic craft."Reading. Velma Pollard is to encounter an acutely sensitive consciousness grappling, even in apparently lighter moments, with the complexity of experience." Evelyn O'Callaghan, Jamaica JournalVelma Pollard writes poetry, fiction and studies of language. She was born in Jamaica and works at the University of the West Indies where she is Dean of the Faculty of Education.

Seller Inventory # LU-9780948833243

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Crown Point
• Publisher: Peepal Tree Press Ltd, GB
• Publication Date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0948833246
• ISBN 13: 9780948833243
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition: 2nd.
• Condition: New
• Weight: 115 grams

About this title

Synopsis

These poems express a range of emotions, from affectionate and observant family portraits to the righteous anger of an Afro-Caribbean woman’s truth telling, to tender poems of loss and remembrance. Shared is a focus on the position of women in Jamaican society and a common depth of reflection and concern with poetic craft. This replaces 0948833246.

About the Author

Velma Pollard is one of the Caribbean's foremost poets. She was formerly a senior lecturer in language education at the University of the West Indies at Mona, where her areas of expertise included the Creole languages of the Anglophone Caribbean, the language of Caribbean literature, and Caribbean women’s writing. She is the author of From Jamaican Creole to Standard English: A Handbook for Teachers, Dread Talk: The Language of Rastafari, Considering Woman, and Shame Trees Don’t Grow Here.