New Voices

FOREWORD

This anthology is an exemplary product of Lorna Goodison’s promotion of Jamaican poetry during her tenure as poet laureate. Her workshops for young people, held across the island, have proven highly successful. Particularly innovative have been the workshops under the caption “All Flowers Are Roses: Poetry and Self-Defence”. This series, beginning with a focus on girls, responded soon enough to a need to include boys, and it has enhanced in the process the addressing of gender-based violence and the awareness of the value of poetry in this regard.

Beyond the achievement of the workshops have been the prizes Goodison has instituted for young poets, beginning with the Helen Zell Young Writers’ Prize for Poetry, a benefaction of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she was professor in the Department of African-American Studies. She then instituted, funded by herself, prizes in the names of three Jamaican poets. This practical gesture will no doubt have evoked in the entrants for the prizes a sense of their taking their place in a tradition. The poems in this anthology are the prize-winning and other short-listed entries for the prizes. The anthology impresses with the general maturity of the poetry, in respect of the engagement with ideas, the evocation of experience and the exercise of craft. The anthology is not to be relegated to the level of “ just for young people”. It takes its place, deservedly, as an addition to the widening world of Jamaican poetry. It is a signal contribution of the poet laureate to that world.

PROFESSOR EDWARD BAUGH, CD
Chairman
Poet Laureate of Jamaica Committee