Kirjahaku

Written in vivid, colourful detail, these rich, compelling stories recreate with sensitivity and wit a whole range of emotions, from childhood hope to brooding melancholy.

Intended as an introductory sourcebook, Olive Senior provides a background to Caribbean literature, politics and society. This text takes a multidisciplinary approach to the study of women and gender issues in the Caribbean. Olive Senior, using her imaginative skills as a poet, has written a readable books based on a substantial academic examinationof women's lives and work in fourteen countries of the Caribbean. In addition she uses examples from literature and popular culture, adn the voices of the women themselves. Caribbean: ISER, University of the West Indies

PARADISE ONCE TRACES THE AFTERMATH of the massacre by Spanish forces of the fictional Maima village in Cuba in 1513. Some believe the destruction of Maima is the result of angering the cem es--Ta no spiritual entities--when foreign practices, contrary to the sacred laws of the Ta no, began to infiltrate the village.Four young people who survive the massacre are unwittingly chosen by the cem es to save a Sacred Bundle and return it to a cave in the Cauta mountain, the mythological place the Ta no are believed to have come from: Night Orchid, a young girl and the reluctant bearer of the Sacred Bundle; the young Ta no noble, Heart of Palm; Flint, whose mother is part of the "Old Ones," a remnant group of people on the islands displaced by the Ta no; and Sekou, an enslaved African born in Spain who has aligned himself with the Ta no resistance.The four survivors start off on separate perilous paths and only learn of their roles in the sacred mission when they unite at the holy site and encounter the Maima shaman Candlewood who has orchestrated their journeys, under orders of the cem es. But the dark shaman Shark Tooth who has sold his soul to the underworld powers has also been shadowing the travelers. Is the old and ailing Candlewood up to one last spiritual battle, the life or death struggle with Shark Tooth for the Sacred Bundle? Restoring the Bundle to the cave as the beating heart of the nation will ensure that the Ta no never die out--their spirit will rise again, no matter how many generations in the future. The epic battle is played out at dawn on the ball court at Cauta. But the journey of the four does not end there, for as newly-made warriors, they are destined to join with others to defend the heartland as the first of the resistance fighters who will become known in history as Cimarrones or Maroons. Senior's exquisitely crafted historical fiction authentically evokes the spiritual heart of the Ta no people in this love song to the Caribbean.

Early in the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, Olive Senior began posting her series of Pandemic Poems on social media. The project was a way of bearing witness to the strangeness of it all and forging a reassuring connection with readers. Each poem is a riff on a word or phrase trending in the first wave of the pandemic - an A to Z of the lexicon newly coined or quickly repurposed for our historic moment. By presenting these words and phrases in sequence, Senior offers a timeline of the way events unfolded and how the language and preoccupations kept changing in response. In this accessible collection, Senior captures the zeitgeist of 2020."Generations to come will read these poems and chart the shifts we've been making or not making as a global community linked by a singular virus bearing multiple challenges. We've needed these poems, and we continue to ever more."-Faizal Deen, author of The Greatest Films"Olive Senior's Pandemic Poems invite, seduce and require us to think and feel in new ways about the intersecting crises of this terrible year. I was moved to laughter, to weeping, and to silence by these poems. They are essential reading."-Rachel L. Mordecai, author of Citizenship under Pressure: The 1970s in Jamaican Literature and Culture"In Pandemic Poems, Olive Senior captures the sense of dread that has affected us since the virus has crept into our lives. . . . Senior transforms seemingly mundane events into meditations on mortality. Pandemic Poems offers a much-needed respite from the deluge of data that surrounds us and provides moments to pause and, perhaps, find peace."-Geoffrey Philp, author of Garvey's Ghost

Longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award 2023 by the League of Canadian Poets. Hurricane Watch: New and Collected Poems brings together Jamaican Poet Laureate Olive Senior's first four books of poetry alongside a new collection. Recipient of the Musgrave Gold Medal in 2005 from the Institute of Jamaica, Senior has long been recognised as a skilful and evocative storyteller but what this book shows is the consistency and range of her achievement. Senior's poems are delicate, formally playful and always finely observed, whether responding to Jamaican birdlife, the larger natural world or the traces of a complicated historical inheritance. Often, and always surprisingly, her poems' brilliant descriptions and vivid, gripping narratives open out into ecological reflections, politics and culture in original, surprising and sensuous ways.

Winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, The Pain Tree is Olive Senior at her very best, unforgettable short stories set in Jamaica and Canada, now available in this beautiful UK and Caribbean edition from Peepal Tree Press.Olive Senior’s new collection of stories, The Pain Tree, is wide-ranging in scope, time period, theme, locale, and voice. There is — along with her characteristic “gossipy voice” — reverence, wit and wisdom, satire, humour, and even farce. The stories range over at most a hundred years, from around the time of the second world war to the present. Like her earlier stories, Jamaica is the setting but the range of characters presented are universally recognisable as people in crisis or on the cusp of transformation.While most of the stories operate within a realist mode, Senior also exploits traditional motifs. Collected here are revenge stories (“The Goodness of my Heart”), a bargain with the Devil (“Boxed-in”), a Cinderella story (“The Country Cousin”), a magical realist interpretation of African spiritual beliefs (“Flying”) and a narrator’s belated acceptance of the healing power of traditional beliefs (“The Pain Tree”). “Coal” is a realist story set in the war years and depression that followed as folks try to find a new place in the world. Senior’s trademark children awakening to self-awareness and to the hypocrisy of adults are here too, from the heartbreaking “Moonlight” and “Silent” to the girls in “Lollipop” and “A Father Like That” who learn to confront loneliness and vulnerability with attitude.

Anna fetches water from the spring every day, but she can't carry it on her head like her older brothers and sisters can. In this charming and poetic family story set in Jamaica, Commonwealth Prize-winning author Olive Senior shows young readers the power of determination, as Anna achieves her goal and overcomes her fear.

In this vibrant and exquisitely illustrated picture book, written by Commonwealth Prize-winning Jamaican-Canadian Olive Senior, and with pictures by the acclaimed artist Laura James (the team that created Anna Carries Water), a young girl learns to love her difficult-to-manage, voluminous and boonoonoonous hair.

The popular West Indian migration narrative often starts with the “Windrush Generation” in 1950’s England, but in Dying to Better Themselves Olive Senior examines an earlier narrative: that of the neglected post-emancipation generation of the 1850’s who were lured to Panama by the promise of lucrative work and who initiated a pattern of circular migration that would transform the islands economically, socially and politically well into the twentieth century.West Indians provided the bulk of the workforce for the construction of the Panama Railroad and the Panama Canal, and between 1850 and 1914 untold numbers sacrificed their lives, limbs and mental faculties to the Panama projects. Many West Indians remained as settlers, their descendants now citizens of Panama; many returned home with enough of a nest egg to better themselves; and others launched themselves elsewhere in the Americas as work beckoned.Senior tells the compelling story of the West Indian rite of passage of “Going to Panama” and captures the complexities behind the iconic “Colón Man”. Drawing on official records, contemporary newspapers, journals and books, songs, sayings, and literature, and the words of the participants themselves, Senior answers the questions as to who went to Panama, how and why; she describes the work they did there, the conditions under which they lived, the impact on their homelands when they returned or on the host societies when they stayed.Many books have shown the “conquest” of the Isthmus of Panama by land and sea exploring how the myriad individual lives touched by the construction of the railroad and the canal changed the world as well.