Explore the poem

The Jamaican poet Olive Senior writes here about the traditional belief that some special stones have fallen from the sky and have remarkable, perhaps even magical properties. They have been used for hundreds of years in sacred rituals. The word “pierre” towards the end of the poem is the French word for stone.

Notice how many letter “o”s and long “o” sounds there are in the poem. Print or write out the poem and highlight them all. Does it look like a series of stones lodged in the structure of the poem?

The style of the poem seems relaxed, almost conversational, and yet we seem to be in a world of magic and mystery and affairs of the heart and spirit. Think about the line breaks. Will you make the lines flow more like natural speech, or will you use the line breaks to make it sound a little stranger?

How else could you reflect the other-worldly feeling in your performance?

About Olive Senior

Born in rural Jamaica, Olive Senior moved to the capital city of Kingston at nineteen to work for a national newspaper. She left to study journalism abroad, first in Wales and then Canada. She was already writing short stories and poems during this time but didn’t dedicate her career to creative writing until the publication of her first collection, Talking of Trees, in 1985. She quickly followed this with a short story collection, Summer Lightning and Other Stories, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Since then Senior has been a prolific writer, regularly publishing poetry and short story collections for adult and children and non-fiction. She has also worked as an editor of two leading journals, Social and Economic Studies at the University of the West Indies and Jamaica Journal, which covers the history and culture of the island.

Senior is interested in identity, gender and race, and in the religion, history and politics of the Caribbean. These interests are reflected in the themes of her poetry and short stories. Nature is also a significant focus of her work. She is a highly-regarded writer across the world, with her work translated into a number of languages and readings of her poetry broadcast on television in the UK and USA. In 2005, she was awarded the Musgrave Gold Medal from the Institute of Jamaica for her contribution to literature. Since 1993 she has been based in Toronto, Canada.