SOURCE: A review of To Us, All Flowers Are Roses, in World Literature Today, Vol. 70, No. 3, Summer, 1996, p. 750.

In the following review, Newson favorably reviews Goodison's To Us, All Flowers Are Roses, praising her treatment of Jamaican themes and imagery.

The forty-one poems contained in Lorna Goodison's most recent collection of poetry leap off the page with the vitality of the region she describes. By turns the poems are nostalgic, irreverent, somber, contemplative, and festive. In sum, the work is as inviting as the cover illustration depicting a Jamaican couple and landscape, creating the broad strokes of a people's existence.

In To Us, All Flowers Are Roses Goodison's range is expansive, from slavery's injustices to poverty in modern Jamaica. Curiously, the topics are bound together by locale as well as by historical and cultural connections. In the poem “O Africans” Goodison reconfigures the Americas—making the Caribbean region...