Poetry Unbound in Conversation — Lorna Goodison

December 12, 2025·54 min·3 clips

Lorna Goodison rewrites Dante's 'Abandon Hope' using Rastafarian language — 'Let go off of all hope, all who enter in here.'

The threshold is literal. Goodison reads from canto 14, where woodland opens into wasteland, hot sand, and a river of blood at the boundary. The language hits the body first. The souls are exposed, crying out, and sorted into punishments that make justice hard to wave away. Violence also travels backward. The host hears Goodison's translation through her mother's cautionary tales, where exaggeration is not decoration but pressure on the listener. Goodison takes that reading seriously. The hope, as the conversation frames it, is that people who cause violence might fear the violence that can come back at them. The poem keeps asking who learns from terror. Dante's punishments are spectacle, yes, but here they sound more like a harsh lesson about harm, consequence, and attention. The mother is not a side note. When the host notices dressmakers in the work, he connects them to Goodison's memoir and her mother's trade. Goodison answers through kinship, naming Louise Bennett as another writer whose mother was a dressmaker. Craft, inheritance, and Caribbean speech enter Dante's underworld without asking permission. Translation is not just transfer. It carries old terror through another music, another history, and voices remembered at home. Greenbelt stays in the background, giving the conversation a public setting while leaving the reading intimate. The host is in the States, Goodison is in Canada, and still the canto pulls them into the same underworld. What lingers is pressure: sand, blood, nakedness, wandering, and poetry making consequence almost too much to look at.

As heard by us

A reflective conversation where Dante's underworld meets family memory and violent justice.

Lorna Goodison's turn through Dante's Inferno feels less like a display of scholarship than a careful conversation with punishment, violence, and divine justice.

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Why you'd press play

If you want a vivid conversation around Dante, this keeps the underworld close to home.

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