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Lorna Goodison Featured in Poems on The Underground

February 18, 2004

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Renown Jamaican Poet, Lorna Goodison is one of the six featured poets in the London Underground’s ‘Poems on the Underground’ project for 2004.
The Poet’s ‘I am Becoming My Mother’ is among the new set of poems in the project, which London Underground says is aimed at lifting “winter gloom”, and has been on display in 2,000 Tube carriages from Monday, February 2 and will continue for another eight weeks.
Miss Goodison is among the best-known poets of the Caribbean region, having published six volumes of poetry. For the sixth, ‘To Us, All Flowers are Roses’, she was awarded a Gold Star by the magazine, Booklist. In 1986 she received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for North and South America.
London Underground says the six poems are a rich mixture of multicultural and international themes, ranging from the warmth and colour of the Caribbean glows in Lorna Goodison’s I Am Becoming My Mother to the sharp contrast of John Clare’s wintry Emmomsail’s Heath in Winter.
The collection also has a strong London presence. W.B. Yeats was living in Primrose Hill, North London, but dreaming of Ireland when he wrote The Lake Isle of Innisfree. A.C. Jacobs’ Spring paints a warm and affectionate portrait of a London suburb as seen through the eyes of the Glaswegian poet who was the child of Russian Jewish immigrants. W.S. Merwin, a New Yorker who worked for the BBC in London for some years, contributes the Separation.
Poems on the Underground were first introduced in 1986 and have become a much-loved London institution. The programme has been copied by transport systems all over the world.
The anthology, Poems on the Underground, published by Cassell, is now in its 10th edition and has sold more than 250,000 copies since it first appeared as 100 Poems on the Underground in 1991. The latest edition includes more than 300 poems.
The Poems on the Underground project is supported by London Underground, the Arts Council of England and the British Council, which distributes the poems to 200 of its offices all over the world.

Last Updated: February 18, 2004

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