Goodison is one of the most distinguished contemporary poets of the Caribbean. Writing in the Hudson Review, David Mason has characterized her work as a "revelation to me, much of it beautiful for its simple negotiation of the line between life and art." Goodison's is an original voice in contemporary poetry, drawing on both African and European inheritances and reminding us that African heritages in the New World are not exclusively those of Americans, and that their Caribbean expression is a significantly different and relatively little known part of the African American experience. Her finely crafted poems often carry a sense of language's healing power in the face of the pain of the past. "Goodison advances from strength to strength. Her sixth collection finds her focusing the diamond lens of her incantatory verse on the culture and people of her homeland in the Caribbean and gives us a book full of pieces well worthy of anthologizing. ...Taken altogether, these poems reinforce each other's many strengths and constitute a long song of struggle and survival of inhumanity and human love." -Patricia Monaghan, from a starred review in Booklist ABOUT THE AUTHOR LORNA GOODlSON, internationally recognized for her poetry and prose, won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, Americas Region, in 1986. She has been a visiting faculty member at the Universities of Toronto and Michigan and a central figure at the Caribbean Poetry Festival of the Poetry Society of America (New York, 1992), the International Poetry Festival South Bank Centre (London, 1992), and the lnterlit International Conference (Erlanger, Germany, 1993). Her poetry and prose have been featured, with that of Alice Walker and Maya Angelou, in A Quartet of Poets and A Quartet of Stories. This is her sixth collection