The Storyteller's Return

"Opal Palmer Adisa has perfected a woman's grammar, and language rooted in the landscape of Jamaica, a landscape that she apprehends as compelling as a woman's body: complex, vibrant, dangerous and beautiful-and her poems emerge with a thick, sensual intensity. In these poems, Adisa brings her sharp eye and rich language to bear on her return to the Jamaica of beauty, sexual and physical violence, loss, and memory-a place where "no one feels safe", and yet a place where the arias of "maaanin-maanin" are restorative. Adisa summons the spirit of women to guide her through memory and the stories in poems that are vulnerable, fierce and revealing. Opal Palmer Adisa has been writing successfully for years, and yet in The Storyteller's Return, one has the sense of a first and complete voice, a way of seeing that is urgent and powerful. Adisa's grandmother tells her, "fi always have a good home/ dash you pee across you doorway". In the woman's grammar, transgression is liberation. This is an affirming and necessary meditation on the contradictory meaning of home by a gifted poet and storyteller. "Home," writes the storyteller, "will always remain unfinished".

Kwame Dawes, author of The Mountain and the Sea.