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Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom
Peepal Tree Press
(May 1999)
Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom takes the reader on a journey of light and voice. From the rural flicker of the firefly and the half-moonlight of exile in the USA, to the sense of connectedness and arrival evoked by the image of the eight-pointed star, Marcia Douglas crafts a vivid poetic voyage.
The collection begins with the image of voicelessness—the country people who witness the coming of electricity to Cocoa Bottom but have no one among them to record the event. Each poem has its own poignant individuality, yet a powerful sense of architecture runs through the collection as a whole. It is also a journey of the voice, traversing back and forth across the Atlantic and continents, pushing through word censors and voice mufflers, and ending in tongues of fire.
Born in England and raised in Jamaica, Douglas brings a transatlantic sensibility to these poems, capturing both the intimate and the historic with lyrical precision.
Blue light slants through the blinds
and makes horizontal marks like notepaper on the wall.
I fill in the lines:
Oh shali waa
shali mahi wa.
Shali.
Shali.
— from "The Gift of Tongues"
Selected Praise
Marcia Douglas has the kind of intent but relaxed concentration which ushers the reader into the life of a poem and makes the event - a wedding, a hot afternoon, an aeroplane journey - seem for a while like the centre of things. This is a rich and very welcome book.
— Poetry Book Society Bulletin
Some writers leave their creative handprints in dark caves where only later happenstance may, perhaps, discover them. Some writers stamp their entire selves upon the language, upon a culture, upon literature and upon our consciousness in so intimate, singular, well-illumined and indelible a manner that there can be no mistaking their poems and prose for those of another. Such a writer is Marcia Douglas.
— The Caribbean Writer
Richly evocative... the attractiveness of this collection is much more than simple exoticism.
— Times Literary Supplement
Douglas understands that if we lose our stories and the stories of those who came before us, we lose our sense of who we are.
— Asheville Poetry Review
