In her collection of poems, Lorna Goodison makes the writing audible. Indeed, she writes in English which is the language spoken in her country, Jamaica but uses the one that is spoken in Jamaica and that is different from the one from the United States for example. This makes her style very recognizable but also creates an oral effect. It seems that she is a teller and that we can hear the story with her own voice or at least the voice of a Jamaican. What can be disturbing and disorienting at first becomes then part of the poetry and the flow of her stanzas is impossible to imagine writing in a different way.
and yu catch a glimpse of the end
through the water in yu eye
I wont tell you what I spy
but is fi dat alone I tread this road
In this stanza from the poem “The Road of the Dread”, we can see how she uses oral forms to creates poetry but also sort of a music for the reader. The power of her writing is also in the fact that by doing that, she writes with her identity. She doesn’t try to sound like an American poet and she identifies her as a Jamaican poet. The interest of that is to see how to use the language of the historic colonization and introducing in the same time the notion of national identity in the writing. This can seem awkward at the first reading but it creates a gap that makes the reader a stranger to this language even if he is an English speaker. She immerses the reader into her culture in a very gentle way and her stanzas are beautifully written and by succeeding at that she puts the reader into a new culture and makes us discover another way to write poetry from an international writer.