Olive senior’s didtinguishing voice

Gardening in the Tropics an anthology of poems by Olive Senior a woman writer of colour contains an affluent Caribbean experience in her poems. Senior skillfully expresses through her poems the different themes and concerns about the Caribbean such as European contact, challenges faced and historical experience. In doing this senior utilizes various techniques such as allusions, intertexuality, and the use of literary metaphors to enhance and further establish themes such as displacement, loss of personal, national and cultural identity, and a response to colonial and imperial oppression. However, senior craft of writing in her poems stands out as a prevalent feature in the poems that has a profound effect on the reader. It takes her skills and her ability to write in such a way as to with each word usher the reader into the Caribbean world of historical experiences and challenges creating particular atmosphere in each of her poems that makes them exciting, pulling the reader in a sort of literary trance that compels them to read. What makes the collection memorable could be the use of themes or Senior’s craft of writing.

The poems Meditation on Red, All Clear 1928 and the Tree of Light are poems that are apart of Gardening in the Tropics are bear the uniqueness of seniors quality of writing and expressions of various themes. Meditation on red and all clear 1928 senior highlights themes such as the suffering, migration and trauma. Through these themes the writer’s intents are revealed. The theme of suffering expressed in both poems speaks to the suffering that women undergo as a result of migration and their traumatic experiences as a result of dislocation from the Caribbean in the case of Jean Rhys who acts as a predecessor for other Caribbean writers. The suffering that of women in marginal places in the society, challenges with migration, difficulty with new environment are themes explored in both poems. by A.S. HCHS.