I Sing to the Greenhearts

A collection haunted by ghosts of colonial history, Maggie Harris’s I Sing to the Greenhearts challenges the dullness of pastoral with unbridled nature. Guyana’s Greenheart tree appears in this collection as one of many plants with attitude, plants that know their history, plants bringing the wild in from the edges. In poems set in a thriving Welsh garden, such as ‘My Banana thinks on Louise Bennett’s “Colonisation in Reverse”’, we find a world in which both ecological crisis and justice are at stake.