Over the Roofs of the World (2005) is Jamaican poet Olive Senior’s third collection of poetry. In her second collection, Gardening in the Tropics, a cycle of poems is connected by themes of cultivation and a repeated opening line. In similar fashion, this collection is organized mostly around various birds—their characteristics, names, and the associative lore surrounding them. Though Senior hews to speech rhythms and moves gracefully between disparate levels of tone, her poems use conventional English orthography, and her spacing and punctuation, even at moments of great emotional intensity or when shaping lines for visual or aural effects, are spare and minimalist.

The collection begins with the image of Columbus (Colón), lost en route to the New World, choosing a course to follow a flock of birds passing overhead. Senior’s opening conceit of navigation and progress deftly places the seasonally migrating birds at the decisive moment of colonial history, making their fortuitous flight the force that impelled Columbus’s course.

Many of Senior’s bird poems are framed by borrowed texts and contexts drawn from poetic and historical archives, such as “Owl,” which cites a line from Hamlet; “Woodpecker,” which proceeds from an Amerindian myth; and “Parakeet,” which flows from a Jamaican revival hymn. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Blackbird” responds to Wallace Stevens’s seminal poem of virtually the same title. “The Secret of Crusoe’s Parrot” retells Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe from the perspective of the parrot, who learns language and contempt for the “senseless cries” of “uncivilized birds” from Crusoe (19).

“Magpie,” for example, is a tour de force of wordplay, weaving puns such as “Pied Piper” and “easy as pie” with the Magpie’s metaphorical and linguistic travels, its eating disorder “pica,” and virtuoso descriptive sequences—for example, an apostrophe to the Magpie as “celebrant of the variegated, the parti-coloured / mixture of paint, pigment, picture of pied beauty” (32).

In addition to the cycle of bird poems, the collection includes “Ode to Pablo Neruda,” a meditation on the poet’s self-discovery in the form of a dialogue with Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, in which Senior’s reflections are woven together with quotations from Neruda. Among the images Senior adopts for her role is that of “Spider’s apprentice. To master language. As / Trickster, to spin and weave tales”—in which she alludes to Anancy, the Ashanti-derived spider-trickster figure of Caribbean folklore (94).

“Rejected Text for Tourist Brochure” is perhaps the collection’s most directly political statement, a wistful and sardonic rhapsody to the beauty of Jamaica that is being rapidly despoiled by economic development and the whims of the tourist industry, as noted in the poem’s cutting refrain, “Come see my land / and know / that she was fair” (53).

Bibliography
Senior, Olive. Over the Roofs of the World. Toronto: Insomnia Press, 2005.

Categories: Literature

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