Rachel Manley's poems explore loss and grief in a life-enhancing way. They confront this most universal of experiences with an exactness to feeling, in language which is simple on the surface and complex in its depths. Death is no terrifying abstraction, but part of life and love, humanised through its associations with the particular. Life is always present in the richly evoked Caribbean world.
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Rachel Manley's poems explore loss and grief in a life-enhancing way. They confront this most universal of experiences with an exactness to feeling, in language which is simple on the surface and complex in its depths. Death is no terrifying abstraction, but part of life and love, humanised through its associations with the particular. Life is always present in the richly evoked Caribbean world.
'Enchanting... like Chopin preludes.' - Louis Simpson.
'A Light Left On... reveals the rich lyricism of her verse, the musicality of her voice, and the clarity and enduring optimism of her vision'. - The Caribbean Writer.
Rachel Manley was born in Cornwall, England in 1955, daughter of an English mother and Jamaican father, the future Prime Minister, Michael Manley (in 1972-1980, and from 1989 until his retirement due to ill-health). At the age of two she came back to Jamaica and was thereafter brought up by her grandparents, Norman Manley, PNP leader, Chief Minister of pre-independence self-governing Jamaica, and Edna Manley, outstanding Caribbean scultor and patron of the arts and literature in Jamaica. Rachel Manley has written a most moving memoir of these years in her Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood (1996), which won a gold medal in the Canadian Governor-General's Literary Awards.
