Mother Jackson murders the moon /

A vivid cast of characters throng these poems. There is Mother Jackson, the ole hige who lays out her thoughts like a mortician, who is both creator and destroyer. There are the players of the Rootsman Theatre of the Absurd, such as fallen politician Julian Lapith, who knows too well the power of incantation; Dub Deacon Lapith with his Sankey soul; poor Bedward Lapith with his millenarian dreams of flight; Busha Godhead self swoopsing down to intervene in human affairs and - the heroine of the cast - Aliveyah, to whom nature speaks direct by the nudge of a beak.

And there is, of course, their creator, Miss G.E., who shares with us the 'rockstone passion of a Jamaican country bumpkin born and nurtured in Arcadia'. Whether in her celebrations of domestic happiness in a house where even the chairs talk, or in her satires on Jamaican life, Gloria Escoffery writes with a visionary intensity and fantastical imagination which is all her own. And though she feels it is no joke to be three people - old woman, young girl and child - who don't quite understand one another, Miss G.E. cannot but write her love letter to the world.

[b]Gloria Escoffery[/b] was born in 1923. She has worked as a teacher, written extensively on Jamaican art and is one of her country's finest painters.