#SummerReads: ‘From Harvey River’ by Lorna Goodison
It’s Summer! This is a time to unwind and get some much needed rest and relaxation. Whether you’re spending your holidays at the beach, in the country, overseas, or just enjoying a relaxing ‘stay-cation’, you’ll want to keep these #SummerReads close at hand.
Handpicked by National Library of Jamaica staff, these books are sure to grab your attention and maybe even teach you something you didn’t know before. All our #SummerReads are available in the book collection at the NLJ. Let us know what you think!
From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island by Lorna Goodison
The fourth pick in our #SummerReads series is From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island by Lorna Goodison, Poet Laureate of Jamaica. This book was selected by Abigail Henry, Special Programmes Director at the NLJ.
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It’s a long-held Jamaican tradition that children should be sent off to ‘country’ to visit with family over the summer. In the spirit of this tradition, I’ve chosen as my #SummerRead recommendation From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island by the Poet Laureate of Jamaica, Lorna Goodison.
Weaving a lyrical and luminous tale that spans several generations, Lorna Goodison tells the story of her mother’s people in From Harvey River. The book begins with Goodison’s great-grandfather, William Harvey, an Englishman who established and gave his name to the village and near-by river in Hanover that would become the family home and ‘an enchanted place in [Goodison’s] imagination’.
As Goodison tells the stories of the birth and naming of her mother and each of the Harvey children, characters are made almost mythic as they are remembered through the gleam of memory and childhood.
Lorna Goodison CD
Poet Laureate 2017-2020
In this book, I heard echoes of stories told to me by my own grandmother – herself hailing from Bull Savannah, St. Elizabeth. She too is from a big family of children with old-fashioned sounding but solid names like Clarence, Ina, Uriah and Hazel (not to mention the inexplicable, Elkanah). Harvey River’s celebration of family history and the everyday reminded me of the wonderful inheritance left to me by my own people.
It is the Harvey women who are the heroes of Harvey River and the book is truly a praise song for Goodison’s mother, Doris; who raised nine children with her husband, Marcus. Facing economic hardship, the family moves to Kingston and trades the lush landscape of Hanover for a concrete tenement yard and ‘hard life’. Still, Doris stitches together a rich spiritual legacy for her children who, as Goodison puts it, ‘are alive and drawing on the blessings she earned for us’.
My favourite part is Goodison’s recounting of the scenes in her mother’s sewing room. My own mother sews as a hobby and I can recall so many afternoons as a child sitting at her elbow holding pincushions and listening to the hum and clatter of the machine.
The memoir also provides a sort of sweeping backdrop to Goodison’s poetry which often centres on issues of family, history, memory, and place. Any fan of the Poet Laureate’s work will happily devour this book.
So this summer, if you haven’t got any family in the country to visit with, never fear, Ms. Goodison has kindly offered us a seat at her own sumptuously spread family table in Harvey River.
Abigail Henry, Director of Special Programmes, NLJ