SOURCE: A review of Turn Thanks, in World Literature Today, Vol. 74, No.1, Winter, 2000, p. 224.

In the following review, Dabydeen praises Goodison's lyricism in Turn Thanks.

Now in her mid-career, Lorna Goodison, born in 1947 in Jamaica, in a key section of her new book Turn Thanks called “The Mango of Poetry,” describes a sensuous attitude to poetry in a poem by the same name: “I would not peel it all back / to reveal its golden entirety, / but I would soften it by rolling / it slowly between my palms.” Further, she considers that this “would be a definition / of what poetry is,” all in her accustomed reflectiveness and meditative quality cast in languorous lines in a collection emphasizing her craft, all in “its golden entirety.” This attitude to poetry was foreshadowed in her first book, Tamarind Season (1980), and was seen in others such as I Am Becoming My Mother (1986) and...