Caribbean Poetry Online: Olive Senior's Gardening in the Tropics

Director: Hyacinth Simpson

The website introduces students, instructors, and the general reader to poetry by contemporary Caribbean authors. The pilot project provides a comprehensive introduction to Gardening in the Tropics, one of the award-winning poetry collections by Olive Senior. In addition to reproducing (with the author’s and publisher’s permission) the text of the 50 poems in the collection complete with line-by-line annotation and an extensive glossary, detailed critical commentary (approximately 1,000 words) is provided for each poem. The peer-reviewed critical commentary (written in large part by the PI, but with contributions from other scholars and instructors of Caribbean poetry) draws on available scholarship and responds to questions raised by instructors and their students in the classroom. Other resources include an author biography, a bibliography for further reading, a glossary of literary terms, mp3 files of the author reading poems from the collection, images (photographic and video) that provide context for critical analysis of the poems, and a 25-minute video interview of the author discussing Caribbean poetry, her writing process, and the poems in Gardening in the Tropics. Similar resources will feature in future online projects on other Caribbean poets.

visit the website for Olive Senior's Gardening in the Tropics (opens in new window)