Mel Cooke, Freelance Writer

After Olive Senior had read 'Auction', the last poem from her latest collection Shell, last Sunday, Carolyn Allen, coordinator of the Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts (PSCCA) invited her to see the result as she was "generous, bold enough to hand over work to others and see what they do with it".

It was, of course, not a solo invitation, as the two-thirds capacity audience at the PSCCA, University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona campus, also witnessed the theatrical readings.

Karl Williams, Nadean Rawlins, Fabian Thomas, Nyanda Cammock and Lisa Brown provided the voice and movement, D.K. Rostant added music through much of the readings and Lesley-Ann Wanliss pulled it all together in her role as director.

There were sounds other than voice and music, primarily the low bellow of the conch shell.

The curtain opened to Rostant's drumming as he walked across the stage to reveal the image of a shell projected on the backdrop with Thomas coming out as the first reader. They all read directly from texts they held in their hands, but this did not detract from the emotion and projection of the presentation.

There were images of an archaeological dig before the reading of 'Taino Genesis', the exhortation to 'PASS IT ON!' which ends the poem being given special emphasis.

Shell theme

The shell motif was creatively integrated into the presentation. At many points, a shell was rested in a book, held to an ear as someone spoke poetry into another or held up high. And shells were used decoratively on the edge of the stage, front and centre, at the launch of Olive Senior's fourth poetry book.

The only props were boxes on which various readers sat at points during the presentation. There was a divergence from the images when the words of 'S(h)ift' were projected, letter by rapid letter that became lines that became verses, on to the backdrop.

'Join-The-Dots' and 'West India Cane Piece Rat' formed a part of the mini-production, which closed with all five presenters on stage to extended and appreciative applause.

Earlier, before Senior had read briefly from Shell, she explained not only the reason for the book but also her motivation for writing verse at all.

"Brace yourselves for whirlwinds coiled in my heart," a smiling Senior said, after the warm applause which followed her introduction by Allen.

She told the audience she had been asked by a television interviewer about the point of what she does. "I don't feel I have to justify what I do," Senior said, adding, however, that she has considered the purpose of poetry.

"It is not the newspaper, but it can bring you news from a far country," she said. That 'far country' is the country of the heart, the mind, the soul "and, hopefully, the conscience".

"Poetry gives us the opportunity to say things that cannot be said any other way," she said.

Senior described Shell as "thematically holistic", portraying the recurrent object, the sea shell, as "the cellphone for hundreds of years" to laughter. She described the shell as containing stories, collected over time, which at some time must be told as "the shell can only sound again if it is emptied".

And Senior, whose "commitment to the Jamaican people is also evident in this book" as head of the Department of Literatures in English, Anthea Morrison, said, presented a copy of Shell to a representative of the UWI's library to end a short, excellent book launch.