Dante’s Inferno by Lorna Goodison (Carcanet, £16.99)
More than 20 years in the making, this career-defining version begins: “Halfway tree. The journey of our life found me / there at midnight in a ramshackle state.” Goodison superimposes her beloved Jamaica on to Dante’s hell, evoking her country and the wider Caribbean region transformed by colonialism, Christianity and natural disasters. Goodison’s Virgil is fearless Miss Lou, the Jamaican poet and performer Louise Bennett-Coverley, who speaks in vivid Caribbean vernacular. Punchy and mission-driven, she is an ingenious invention gifted with unforgettable lines: “Art is Almighty God grandpickney”; “I never stop defend wi language. / I train at RADA; fi mi stage was the whole world.” Goodison teases out the tender interdependency between Miss Lou and the poet without downplaying the tricky power dynamics. Structurally faithful to the original, comparable in scale and inventiveness to Derek Walcott’s Omeros, this is an expert recasting for a different time, place and people: an epoch-making poem.
Wellwater by Karen Solie (Picador, £12.99)
Solie’s new collection ushers us into a world of corporate herbicides and devastating fires, though beauty can still be observed in unlikely places: a basement, snowplow, horseshoe or flashlight. With forensic attentiveness, her poems document “the chemical … wedded to the seed” and “the kingdom of grass … wild, false, tufted, and procumbent”. Her expansive, talkative lines unpack tight domestic spaces jam-packed with childhood memories as well as the awesome vistas of vast, dust-filled Canadian landscapes. Sometimes didactic and anecdotal, always matter-of-fact, Solie is a philosophical conversationalist: “With knowledge comes / that duty. Pain, mostly, and the relief from pain. / Duty performed willingly feels like kindness / to its recipients, kindness withheld like cruelty.” This is a well-timed book addressing our moment of climatic turbulence.
