Doe Songs

Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné’s poems inhabit a world of permeable barriers and transformations between men and women, humans and animals, the hunters and the hunted and the living and the dead. Her collection creates for us vivid images of the rural Trinidadian world, where she grew up and still lives in. This is a world where the real and the mythical rub shoulders, where people know about the magical properties of plants, where anything can happen, where “everything that breathes will howl”. What emerges from her vivid word pictures are images of the complexity of family ties, of motherhood that is both tender and fearsome, of an intimacy with the natural world which is torn between fears for its fragility and hopes for its resilience. In the words of Shivanee Ramlochan, “Boodoo-Fortuné’s lines are primed for simplicity and brutality alike… of the promises stirring within buried bones… and all manner of unknowable, mysterious selves.”

As the recent winner of the Holick-Arvon and Wasafiri poetry prizes, Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné is a powerful new voice in poetry.