Title: Leaf-of-Life
Author: Opal Palmer Adisa
Reviewed by: Michael Reckord
Here is a quotation from this poetry collection.
"Opal Palmer Adisa was born in Kingston, Jamaica and spent most of her formative years on a sugar estate. As a child she often wandered the immense space, recording what she saw and heard in old exercise books. She loved poetry and memorised many throughout her childhood."
Here is another. "Book learning was his ambition. When the opportunity presented itself, he stowed away on a ship, going first to the Bahamas, then making his way to the Virgin Islands, then finally losing himself in Brooklyn, the emerging vista of his people."
The first quotation, undoubtedly prose, is taken from the bio-sketch at the back of the book. Arranged differently on the page, it would still be prose.
The second piece is supposed to be poetry. Originally, it was arranged differently on the page.
A segment from Adisa's "poem" Each One Teach One it was written in short lines and without capitalization and punctuation.
But since there's no real difference in its style, it follows that it, too, is prose. Prose written in short lines and without capitalisation and punctuation remains prose.
True, prose may be poetic. That is, it may have a number of the characteristics of poetry, like rhyme, rhythm, concentrated meaning, a strong metaphorical content, regular metre and so on.
The more of those characteristics a work has, the more poetic it is and a particular bit of writing with enough of the characteristics may be called prose-poetry.
There is no fixed dividing line between the two types of writing - prose can merge into poetry, like blue into green. I see many of the pieces in this book as "blue-green," as prose-poems.
They do not, therefore, live up to one's expectations. While there is nothing wrong with prose-poetry, the book purports to be poetry.
Ms. Adisa's credentials suggest she should be more of a purist. Her poems have been widely published - in Jamaica, Canada, England, Germany, Amsterdam and the United States.
She has taught poetry, creative writing and literature at a number of U.S. universities -- including prestigious ones like the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University - as well as California College of Arts and Crafts. She is - or was, up to 2000 when the book was published - a professor at the last named institution.
And she is much published. She has to her credit a novel, a children's book, a recording, a collection of short stories and three volumes of poetry, including this one.
But whether many of the 41 poems in this collection are prose, prose-poetry or bona fide poetry, all have some charm. A few are very good. For example, the imagery of Blue Mountain is vivid:
"you must travel to the top of the blue mountain
where coffee is grown and lizards run wild
you must go way up
where the head of the mountain
brushes the clouds and the fragrant wind dances all day."
Ms. Adisa tackles numerous subjects - preparing leaf of life tea (the title poem), the author's African origins (Where I come From") and her racial connections, generally; the runaway slave Three finger Jack, romantic love, writing poetry, family relationships, the wisdom of old people and the lessons of history.
Evidence of her knowledge of and love for the Jamaican countryside is seen in the several poems she writes on Jamaican plants, leaf of life, God bush (mistletoe), fennel, pimento, lignum vitae, cerassee. She finds all useful, most possessing the remedy for some ailment.
Toward the end of the book, she waxes philosophical, giving herself and her readers advice on how to live.
In these, not really strong poems, she looks at the virtues of Staying Focused, she suggests that "all doubts and worries/ should be lain on our pillow/ just before we go to sleep," and she contemplates the things she has learned, like the fact that "all pain/ no matter how intense/ heal with time."
But all in all, Leaf-of-Life is worth sipping.
Publisher: Jukebox Press, Oakland, Ca.
