I’m being called back to my childhood.To the dirt road fading into the marled hillto the place where the steel drumsgrew out of the red clay. Where the yamvines became skipping ropes and cottas for our heads.I’m being summoned back to the bushwhere the mangos are worth the five-milewalk in the heat and the fear of cowssending us back through the field overthe stone wall that ends where our eyes cannot reach.I’m being demanded back to the beach,the pears, the bulla-cakes, the soft drinkbottles selling for a dollar, and the hand–balls, the cricket in the front yardand the fights — the fights I will always win.I’m being given back to you, to the landof my birth, to the childhood of my pastto the mother, father, and the sisterswho longed to say, “Sit, me we plait you hair.”I’m being handed back to you — my childhood home.
Nostalgia
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“Nostalgia” from COCO ISLAND: by Christine Roseeta Walker.
Published by Carcanet Press on April 25, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Christine Roseeta Walker.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Christine Roseeta Walker is a poet and novelist living in Manchester. Her debut collection, Coco Island (Carcanet, 2024) was shortlisted for the John Pollard International Prize for Poetry, the Bocas Caribbean Literary Prize for Poetry, and the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, establishing her as a distinctive and assured poetic voice. Her work is recognised for its precision, emotional intelligence, and sustained engagement with place, memory, and narrative. Each poem is rendered through restrained lyricism and exacting observation. She writes with authority on personal history, landscape, and familial memory. Set in Negril, Jamaica, Coco Island asks a universal question: what happens to children when families fall apart? Walker is currently developing her second poetry collection, which engages with the landscapes of Cheshire, England, extending her exploration of place, people, and the natural world. She is Poet-in-Residence at the Avro Aviation Heritage Museum in Woodford Cheshire, where she is creating new work that brings to life the pioneers of British aviation.
Christine Roseeta Walker's first book is set entirely in Negril, Jamaica. Coco Island presents a compelling cycle of poems, attentive to the undertow and hidden forces that shape a place and its people. In narrative poems, in songs, in fables, in comic scenes, ghost stories and vivid character sketches—especially of girls and women—Walker artfully lays bare how economic necessity, religious belief, illness and addiction reach far into the structures of family life and community. Piecing together the isolated lives of those left behind as the island modernises, her fearless, memorable poems chart the devastation of a world.
"Christine Roseeta Walker can spin a long line as thick as crabs in a barrel foaming and looking for a 'mongoose sun'. Equally, she can shape a narrow concrete poem like a stick, re-delivering the impact of remembered shock. Poem after poem, the Island itself wraps you in every aspect of its texture. You will be compelled by greeting cards and cobwebs, fireflies and broken glasses, cemetery and bedroom. Through the lived and dreamt encounters of humans and other sensitive creatures desirous of a better world, Coco Island delicately explores current cruelty and the legacy of transgenerational trauma. Both magician and engineer, Walker steers us through perspectival shifts, resisting familiar "Caribbean" tropes: grandmothers don't provide teaching, mischief is in the undeclared, and madness and witchcraft pass down from Macbeth's cold land. The gorgeousness of narrative, dramatic, and other forms of saying and writing grip you and pull you close."
—Anthony Vahni Capildeo
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