To Ease Her Exile

WRITING IN 2004, LEE M. JENKINS noted that fact that at present a biography of Marson is available, but no edition of her poetry (her four volumes of are all long out of print, although her work is represented in a number of anthologies) perhaps suggests that . . . interest in Marson, and her final significance, is contextual rather than textual.2 Thankfully, Alison Donnell has provided a corrective to this situation by producing and editing Una Marson: Selected Poems.Donnell's introduction provides valuable context for understanding Marson's verse and is just enough without overpowering the poetry to come. Readers are introduced to the publishing history of Marson's texts, key critical receptions of her work, an overview of her life, and suggestions for how her might be grouped -poems of poems for Jamaica, poems of love, poems of the blues, poems for the people and poems of peace and war. Two other sections, A Woman's World and Beyond the Black Burden, highlight verse contained within this selection that speak of Marson's position and situation as a black female activist writing during a time both of change and of a frustrating continuance of sexism and racism. Selections are taken from Marson's four single-author collections - Tropic Reveries? Heights and Depths,4 The Moth and the Star? and Toward the Stars6 - as well as from which originally appeared in The Keys (the League of Coloured Peoples journal), and unpublished later poems. There is also one previously unpublished poem, Paris and London, written circa 1944, which constitutes its own section.In the vein of so many critics who have rightfully observed that a consideration of Marson's verse is overwhelmingly overshadowed by an emphasis on her biography, Donnell notes at the beginning of her introduction that if [Marson's] name excites interest in the early twenty-first century, then it is usually not as the Jamaican woman poet whose works pioneered the articulation of gender and racial oppression, brought Jamaican vernacular voices alongside a Wordsworthian passion for nature, and ventured to give subjectivity to powerless and marginalised subjects ... If Marson is known at all, then it is often through the incompatible frames of female facilitator, feminine poet or feminist pioneer (11). Thus, Donnell provides a rationale for her choices: This collection . . . consciously rejects the categorising of her work according to oppositional poetic and political modes: either sentimental or polemical, feminine or feminist, resistant or complicit. Rather, the selected here aim to set out these seemingly competing archives of her work alongside each other in order to foreground and to invest positively in what might be seen as Marson's poetic (12). Whether the word should be unevenness or diversity is something worth considering after perusing this selection, but what Donnell's text does indicate is a need to re- think Jenkins's following claim: Dabydeen's statement that Marson's poetry remains 'grossly undervalued' (Kunapipi, n.p.) perhaps invites inflated revaluations of an oeuvre that, with some striking exceptions, is finally less compelling than its author and her remarkable life.7An assessment of Donnell's core work - her representation of Marson's verse - should begin by noting that even though in the process of compiling this selection she necessarily had to omit numerous (as a result of which one does not get a full sense of the narrative arcs of individual collections), Donnell admirably maintains the sequential ordering of poems. Too often, editors decide to group works according to their own thematic tastes and discoveries, and this decision destroys the narrative of sequencing which so many poets painstakingly consider. As well, this is a reader-friendly book, with original publication information provided for the bibliographically inclined following each poem, and with substantial endnotes for eleven of Marson's poems

Art · Linguistics · Literature · Poetry · Reading (process · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Cuban History and Society · Latin American and Latino Studies · Philosophy

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