Crown Point

Crown Point is the first collection of poems by one of the Caribbean's foremost woman poets.

Velma Pollard's poems range from affectionate and observant family portraits to the righteous anger of an Afro-Caribbean woman's truth telling. Crown Point closes with a moving series of poems that meditate on death, mourning and their meaning for the living. They speak both of the deaths of parents and grandparents and of 'deaths falling early' and hear always Anancy's susu susu whispering words, 'tiday fi mi / tumaro fi yu'. These are poems which have a quiet, consoling truthfulness, no answers, just the unvarnished reminder that this is the way of life and that the dead remain with us: 'No one philosophy can answer all / each man is an island / each mind is a muffin tin / and so we sit with our invisible pencils / working out strategies to cope with brevity / to cope with our adieux / to love - too sweet to forget / to life - too intense to leave...' These tender elegiac poems of loss and remembrance have an eloquent stillness at their heart. All share a common depth of reflection and concern with poetic craft.

"Reading... Velma Pollard is to encounter an acutely sensitive consciousness grappling, even in apparently lighter moments, with the complexity of experience." Evelyn O'Callaghan, Jamaica Journal

Velma Pollard writes poetry, fiction and studies of language. She was born in Jamaica and works at the University of the West Indies where she is Dean of the Faculty of Education.