Olive Senior

This book offers the first sustained and comprehensive discussion of the Jamaican writer, Olive Seniors extensive oeuvre, including poetry, short stories and socio-cultural writings published from the late 1970s onwards. Now resident in Toronto, Seniors work remains intensely focused on Jamaica: its landscape, language, people and cultures. Her work offers portraits of ordinary Jamaicans negotiating the harsh postcolonial realities of life within Jamaica as well as those who migrate in search of work. The book discuss Seniors scrutiny of the way power operates at global and local levels alerting the reader to the bigger historical narratives that position (but dont quite fix) the individuals she writes about. The detailed inventory of Jamaican life in the short stories and poetry is consolidated in Seniors cultural archival work. Deploying a poetics of wry understatement, Seniors oeuvre insinuates rather than declaims its truths and makes a distinct and invaluable intervention in Caribbean Literature.