“Original Roots: The Sound & Story of Jamaican Tradition”

Olive Senior, poet laureate of Jamaica 2021–24, is the author of 20 books, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, children’s literature, and other published work. She has received many awards, and her work has been adapted for radio and stage, translated into many languages, and taught internationally. Hurricane Watch: New and Collected Poems (Carcanet Press Ltd.) brings together Senior’s first four books of poetry alongside a new collection. She has long been recognized as a skillful and evocative storyteller, but this book shows the consistency and range of her achievement. Senior’s poems are delicate, formally playful, and always finely observed, whether responding to Jamaican birdlife, the larger natural world, or the traces of a complicated historical inheritance. Often, and always surprisingly, her poems’ brilliant descriptions and vivid, gripping narratives open out into ecological reflections, politics, and culture in original and sensuous ways.