6pm-8pm
Join author Dr Velma McClymont at West Norwood Library on Friday 28 June, 5.30-8.00pm, honouring the Windrush Generation. There will be a presentation, Q & A, and a chance to purchase a signed copy of Dr McClymont's new Windrush book, Walk-Foot Woman and Other Poems.
Part of the Lambeth Readers & Writers Festival in collaboration with West Norwood Library
It is free to attend, but booking is essential due to limited places.
Please click on the headline for more info and booking link ...
Walk-Foot Woman and Other Poems is the first of five collections of poetry by Dr Velma McClymont. Written over a period of twenty years (and some during the Covid pandemic when the world was in lockdown), the poems reflect the poet’s journey from her rural Jamaican childhood to growing up in London during the Windrush era.
More on Walk-Foot Woman
Carving out a space for herself in the literary world, McClymont is proud of her Caribbean heritage (orature/the West African storytelling tradition), which is explored in the title poem, “Walk-Foot Woman”. In this ‘lyric poem’ that captures another time and place, the poet charts her journey and ends thus: “I left a trail for those who’d come after. I, the walk-foot woman, tied seven strips/Of my plaid headtie on random branches.”
Throughout the collection, McClymont’s poetry relies on different forms: free verse, sonnet, haiku (Jamaican-style), elegy, ode, pastoral – and rhyming schemes too! Her style is often lyrical (“Bread Basket: Ode to Maya Angelou”), humorous (“Garden Statuary”, “Celebrity Fridge”, “Scenes from Gatwick Airport”), gossipy (“Black Forest Gateaux”, “The Reaper’s Garden”, “Yabba Pot: The Good Old Days” – Jamaican labrish), serious (“Sea Breeze”, “Footprints Upon Our Souls”, “Fossils in Rocks”, “Watery Wealth”) and haunting (“The Yellow Butterfly”, “Enemies of the Empire”, “The Stone-Breakers”, “Black Ivory: Call and Response”, “I Shall Return”), especially when exploring transatlantic slavery (“Archway of No Return”, “Merchant City”, “The Imperialist Yoke”), nature (“On the Brink”, “The Fickle Weather”) and the Jamaican landscape of her childhood (“Compulsive Walkers”, ”Jamaican Talls”, “Drumilly Remembered” et al).
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More about Dr McClymont
Dr Velma McClymont is a writer, poet, scholar-activist, international speaker and the director/publisher of WomanzVue Books. She is a former lecturer in Caribbean Studies and has worked in banking, local government and as a visiting author in schools and libraries across the UK (including Scotland) and in Jamaica.
Her latest novel is Little River, a sweeping historical novel of a Scottish sugar baron and the Jamaica his life becomes enmeshed with.
A Windrush child, Dr. McClymont, born in rural Jamaica, joined her parents in England in the late 1960's. She grew up in Battersea in the London Borough of Wandsworth where she attended a RC convent school.
