Read more
A Fierce Green Place: New and Selected Poems brings together, across the span of thirty-plus years, the rebellious, innovative work of the Jamaican-born Canadian writer Pamela Mordecai. From her acclaimed first collection
Journey Poem published in 1989, to the moving elegy for her murdered brother in
the true blue of islands, to the stories of freed slaves told in
subversive sonnets, and on to her dazzling reimaginings of biblical stories,
A Fierce Green Place highlights the astounding range and depths of a poet who mixes Jamaican Creole with standard English, profanity and reverence with dub and blues, the oral and vernacular with metrical virtuosity. Mordecai's words, written out of a "womb-space" of sound and power, shine through neo-colonial violence and patriarchy with such lines as: "Women together / in one place will / bleed in solidarity / till every last body / turn super bitch at once."
About the author
Pamela Mordecai has published eight collections of poetry, five children's books, and a collection of short fiction,
Pink Icing first published by Insomniac Press and recently released as an audiobook read by herself in ECW Press's Bespeak Audio Editions. Her debut novel,
Red Jacket, was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Award, one of Canada's top prizes for literary fiction. Mordecai is well known internationally for her children's poems, which have been widely anthologized as well as used in language-arts curricula in the Caribbean, India, Malaysia, UK, USA, and West Africa. A veteran anthologist with several collections to her credit, she has a special interest in the writing of Caribbean women. She has published numerous language-arts textbooks for the Caribbean, most of them with the late Grace Walker-Gordon. A play for children,
El Numero Uno or the Pig from Lopinot, had its world premiere at the Young People's Theatre in Toronto in 2010 and its Caribbean premiere at the Edna Manley School for the Performing Arts in Kingston in 2016. With her late husband, Martin, Mordecai wrote
Culture and Customs of Jamaica in a series edited by Peter Standish, originally for Greenwood Press. A trained language arts teacher with a PhD in English, she was for many years publications officer in the Faculty of Education, UWI and publications editor of the
Caribbean Journal of Education. She has also worked in media, especially television. In 2015, Mordecai was filmed reading her first five poetry collections, as well as some poems and stories for children. The videorecordings can be accessed at https://mordecai.citl.mun.ca. She lives in Toronto and has three children and a granddaughter.
