Verdant Verse in Ground Provisions
A harmony of rich imagery and deft periphrasis resonates in Shauna M. Morgan’s debut poetry collection Ground Provisions. The collection is split into three sections representing three eras of her life: her childhood in rural Jamaica, her young adulthood as an immigrant mother in the Southeast United States, and her adulthood reconnecting with her Caribbean roots.
Section I of Ground Provisions is full of competing motifs. The bountiful provenance of Jamaican flora is complemented by the youthful discovery of sexuality, but both are contrasted with the history of slavery in Jamaica and the cycles of (often sexual) abuse that come from it. The effect is a haunting and masterfully constructed environment that at once nurtures and mistreats the poetic narrator.
Section II marks a departure from this environment, depicting the brutality of American anti-Black racism and the plurality of domestic abuse.
Finally, Section III turns internally. Many of the poems in this section centre Morgan’s home garden, utilising agriculture as a metaphor for her self actualisation. The poems from this section tended to be my favourites, but I’m inclined to believe this is due to the thematic groundwork Morgan builds in previous sections.
Overall, the strongest part of Morgan’s collection is the intertextuality of her poems. For example, “Ode to Mountain Mint” exalts the wild mint plants of Appalachia in the context of their ecological and indigenous importance. The poem opens by beckoning to the “honeybee,” “blue-winged wasp,” and “soldier beetle,” which all depend on mint for food, then praises how the mint “draws us close” and makes “communities abound.” Morgan links the mint to its Indigenous name, spoken in “spirit tongues,” as immanent to the plant as its leaves or stem. This praise is made even more prescient by an earlier poem, “Plantation Mint,” which taps into the irony of corporate pride built on a history of indentured servitude and slavery.
In this poem, the poetic narrator is preparing a cup of “natural American grown spearmint” tea when the sound of the kettle boiling, its “deep groan / of labour,” provokes ancestral memories of “a great grandmother wailing, / a cast iron rod, a label of fire, a cheek burning bright.” The “whirling colonial recipe” examined in the latter is rewritten in the former, recentring the Indigenous and African diasporas who have continually tended Appalachia.
This is an excellent collection for readers of Claudia Rankine and Terrance Hayes, as well as anyone interested in an emotionally resonant perspective on Afro-Caribbean identity and the American South.
A copy of this collection was sent to Felix by the publisher, Peepal Tree Press, for review.
