A Fierce Green Place: New and Selected Poems brings together, across the span of thirty-plus years, the rebellious, innovative work of the Jamaican-born Canadian writer Pamela Mordecai. From her acclaimed first collection Journey Poem published in 1989, to the moving elegy for her murdered brother in the true blue of islands, to the stories of freed slaves told in subversive sonnets, and on to her dazzling reimaginings of biblical stories, A Fierce Green Place highlights the astounding range and depths of a poet who mixes Jamaican Creole with standard English, profanity and reverence with dub and blues, the oral and vernacular with metrical virtuosity. Mordecai's words, written out of a "womb-space" of sound and power, shine through neo-colonial violence and patriarchy with such lines as: "Women together / in one place will / bleed in solidarity / till every last body / turn super bitch at once."

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.

In this insightful collection of poetry that brims with self-deprecating honesty and sexual frankness, themes of spirituality and gender relations are explored through topics such as the death of friends and relatives, the anxiety of being a foreigner in another country, the peril of unrequited love, the importance of size in sexual play, and the premonition of tragedy. With a deft handling of syntax, these thought-provoking epiphanies on the human condition and haunted memories are full of earthy sensuality and celebratory humor that are rooted in the everyday details of living, loving, fearing, laughing, and hoping. Tanya Shirley is an award-winning poet and educator. She lectures in the department of literatures at the University of the West Indies as well as a fellow of Cave Canem, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the discovery and cultivation of new voices in African American poetry. Her work has appeared in The Caribbean Writer, New Caribbean Poetry: An Anthology, and Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism.