This second collection of poems confirms why Tanya Shirley is so
much in demand for readings. The stories she tells have their
finger on the pulse of contemporary Jamaica in all its exuberance
and brokenness. She tells these stories with a winning mixture of
acute observation, outrage, outrageousness, tenderness and
understanding. They present a poetic persona of a woman who is
"sometimes dangling from high wires/ but always out in the open".
So that whilst there is no one who so wittily skewers the
misogynistic, she is also honest about the complicity of women in
their own acts of submission, of how "I danced flat-footed in your
dense air". There is joy in the energy and delights of the body but
also a keen awareness of ageing and the body's derelictions. If
there is one overarching vision it is that love is "larger than the
space we live in", a love represented by the "merchant of feathers
- now a woman/ selling softness in these hard times", or the mother
who tends the battered face of her son, the victim of a homophobic
beating. There is scarcely a line without some memorable phrase -
the madman who chants his "lullaby of badwords", the father who
"became the water within him" - but these are much more than an
assembly of sharp images; closer reading shows just how shapely and
elegant these poems are.
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