environment and space 157prison that morning. The characters include an impatient man in
a bandana, a long-haired rocker, the twin of a country and western
singer, two silent black men and a Native American man.
Humorously, through this anxious lens, the passengers begin to
morph into threatening historical public fi gures and artists. A man
with an eye patch looks like ‘Henry Morgan, retired wicked bucca-
neer and born-again governor’ (p. 21 ), whereas the driver becomes
‘like J. Edgar Hoover’ and the others ‘like Tippu Tip / Augusto
Pinochet, Margaret Thatcher, Émile Zola’ (p. 22 ). Goodison
juxtaposes internal clanging rhymes within the lines to create a
sense of discord and heightened awareness. Travelling to Detroit
becomes a nightmarish scenario, and Goodison dramatises wryly
the fear of others joining the Greyhound bus: They have ‘mad
dogs and fouling pieces, sheep cloning pox blankets, / anthrax
warfare, agent orange blunderbusses’ (p. 22 ). From Vietnam war-
fare’s ‘agent orange’ to the infection and dissemination of Native
Americans through smallpox, each new passenger is a threat. But
Goodison recognises that there is humour also in the situation as
the speaker urges the Greyhound to ‘Run, hound of the Pharaohs,
run like the twinned Blue Nile’ (p. 22 ). Goodison’s poem creates
a travelogue of signifi cant cultural dislocation, but also gen-
erates self-deprecating comedy. Jahan Ramazani proposes that
Goodison’s lengthy periods away from Jamaica teaching at institu-
tions around the world enables a form of ‘poetic transnationalism’
in her poetry.^55 Read in this light, we might concur with Ramazani
that Goodison’s depiction of that most American of cultural repre-
sentations, the Greyhound bus, strives to counter the idea of a ‘her-
metically^ sealed national or civilizational bloc, but of intercultural^
worlds that ceaselessly overlap, intersect, and converge’.^56
ECOPOETICS AND THE FUTURE
Considering poetry as a form of travelogue allows us to examine the
relationship between the local and the global, as well as the poet’s
position as an observer of other cultures. Recent developments
in ecocriticism further frame the relationship between environ-
ment and poetry. Ecocritic Buell suggests that the idea of a poet