SOURCE: “Goodison on the Road to Heartease,” in Journal of West Indian Literature, Vol. 1, No. 1, October, 1986, pp. 13-22.

In the following essay, Baugh praises Goodison's poetry and discusses ways in which she has matured as a poet.

Lorna Goodison has spoken recently about a sequence of poems on which she has been working, a sequence which may in effect constitute one long poem under the title Heartease. It appears that a recurring and unifying metaphor in the sequence will be that of a journey towards a place called Heartease. As she explains, and as we should expect, Heartease signifies “an internal and a spiritual freedom:”

Heartease sort of tries to speak to a place inside you, because that is very true too, that there is this place inside you that if you're lucky to find it then exterior hardships become much easier.¹

The choice of Heartease as geographical...