FROM HARVEY RIVER

A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island

By Lorna Goodison

Amistad. 288 pp. $24.95

Lorna Goodison, the internationally known Jamaican poet, has now written a family memoir. "From Harvey River" covers some generic colonial matters: how white men, both respectable and disreputable, came to the island a couple of hundred years ago to make their fortunes and find new lives; how masses of the "native" (i.e., African) population were in one way or another uprooted from their land and ended up in the inhospitable but fascinating city of Kingston, where they had to learn new skills to stay afloat. But Goodison intermingles her more personal material with reverent and luminous memories of her mother and four aunts, the "Fabulous Harvey Girls," who hailed from the lovely little rural hamlet of Harvey River: young women who burned up the place with their beauty and pizazz -- until they walked out of their youth in various directions, enduring the vicissitudes and challenges of the larger world, armed mostly with the etiquette and strong beliefs they had learned in their Eden-like childhood home. 

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