Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom
Marcia Douglas
Electricity Comes To Cocoa Bottom Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom takes the reader on a journey of light, from the flicker of the firefly in rural Jamaica, through the half-moonlight of the limbo of exile in the USA to the point of arrival and reconnection imaged by the eight-pointed star.
It is also a journey of the voice, traversing back and forth across the Atlantic and across continents, pushing its way through word censors and voice mufflers and ending in tongues of fire.
In making this book a Poetry Book Society recommendation, its selector commented: 'Marcia Douglas has the kind of intent but relaxed concentration which ushers the reader into the life of a poem and makes the event - a wedding, a hot afternoon, an aeroplane journey - seem for a while like the centre of things. This is a rich and very welcome book.'
June Owens writes in The Caribbean Writer: 'Some writers leave their creative handprints in dark caves where only later happenstance may, perhaps, discover them. Some writers stamp their entire selves upon the language, upon a culture, upon literature and upon our consciousness in so intimate, singular, well-illumined and indelible a manner that there can be no mistaking their poems and prose for those of another. Such a writer is Marcia Douglas.'
Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom by Marcia Douglas * The title, Cocoa Bottom, is exotic - these people are not used to electricity. * Narrative feel throughout poem. Then all the children of Cocoa Bottom went to see Mr. Samuel's electric lights. - God-like, miracle worker, great spectacle
They camped on the grass bank outside his house, their lamps filled with oil, - aware of light, not electricity; artificiality of western world will corrupt them waiting for sunset, watching the sky turn yellow, orange.
Grannie Patterson across the road peeped through the crack in her porch door.
The cable was drawn like a pencil line across the sun. - cable scarred landscape
The fireflies
Electricity Comes To Cocoa Bottom Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom takes the reader on a journey of light, from the flicker of the firefly in rural Jamaica, through the half-moonlight of the limbo of exile in the USA to the point of arrival and reconnection imaged by the eight-pointed star.
It is also a journey of the voice, traversing back and forth across the Atlantic and across continents, pushing its way through word censors and voice mufflers and ending in tongues of fire.
In making this book a Poetry Book Society recommendation, its selector commented: 'Marcia Douglas has the kind of intent but relaxed concentration which ushers the reader into the life of a poem and makes the event - a wedding, a hot afternoon, an aeroplane journey - seem for a while like the centre of things. This is a rich and very welcome book.'
June Owens writes in The Caribbean Writer: 'Some writers leave their creative handprints in dark caves where only later happenstance may, perhaps, discover them. Some writers stamp their entire selves upon the language, upon a culture, upon literature and upon our consciousness in so intimate, singular, well-illumined and indelible a manner that there can be no mistaking their poems and prose for those of another. Such a writer is Marcia Douglas.'
Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom by Marcia Douglas * The title, Cocoa Bottom, is exotic - these people are not used to electricity. * Narrative feel throughout poem. Then all the children of Cocoa Bottom went to see Mr. Samuel's electric lights. - God-like, miracle worker, great spectacle
They camped on the grass bank outside his house, their lamps filled with oil, - aware of light, not electricity; artificiality of western world will corrupt them waiting for sunset, watching the sky turn yellow, orange.
Grannie Patterson across the road peeped through the crack in her porch door.
The cable was drawn like a pencil line across the sun. - cable scarred landscape
The fireflies