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'Poetry, always foremost of the arts in traditional Africa, has continued to compete for primacy against the newer forms of prose fiction and theatre drama.' This wonderfully comprehensive anthology of African poetry has been expanded to include ninety-nine poets from twenty-seven countries, thirty-one of whom appear for the first time. Equally wide-ranging is the content of the poetry itself: war songs and political protests jostle with poems about human love, African nature and the surprises that life offers; all are represented in these rich and colourful pages.
The spirit of the poetic flowering of the 1960s is encapsulated in this comprehensive anthology. The collection gives voice to some fifty poets from Kenya, Uganda and Zambia, writing in English. The diversity of the interests and styles of the individual poets is illustrated: a blend of the gentle lyricism that is a feature of East African writing. All the major poets are included, and many not so well known. Amongst the best known are Jared Angira, Jonathan Kariara, Joseph Kariuki, Taban Lo Liyong, Okot p'Bitek, and David Rubadiri - one of the editors.
This anthology represents some of the best African poetry written in English in the last 30 years. The poets include Wole Soyinka, Dennis Brutus, Kojo Laing, Chenjerai Hove and Gabriel Gbadamosi.
Emmanuel Ngara evaluates the ability of poets to communicate with their readers. His two studies of style and ideology in novels from Africa have made a considerable impact. He has now used the same technique to help students come to terms with the demanding question of poetic style. -- From back cover
Previous studies of African poetry have tended to concentrate either on its political content or on its relationship to various European schools. This book examines West African poetry in English and French against the background of oral poetry in the vernacular. Do the roots of such poetry lie in Africa or in Europe? In committing their work to writing, do poets lose more than they gain? Can the immediacy of oral performance ever be recovered? Robert Fraser's account of two centuries of West African verse examines its subjugation to a succession of international styles: from the heroic couplet to the austerity of experimental Modernism. Successive chapters take us through the Négritude movement and the emergence of anglophone free verse in the 1950s to the rediscovery in recent years of the neglected springs of orality, which is the subject of the concluding chapter.
South Africa is a complicated, contradictory, and haunted place. Len Verwey captures the trajectory of life in such a place, dealing with childhood, war, marriage, divorce, and death. He explores the challenges posed by place and history, shared identities, deep embeddedness in the continent, and the legacies of violence and exclusion, as well as beauty. Verwey offers poems that speak of uncertainty, ask questions, and challenge simplistic and scapegoating narratives that become so tempting when living in a society undergoing intense social and economic pressure. Dealing less with factual or political explanations of war and more with the compulsion of war, in particular, "maleness" and violence, Verwey pulls the reader into another world, opening eyes to the "crisis of men," the violence against women, children, and the foreign in a country where conflicts are again escalating. In a Language That You Know strives to understand the complexity of one of the most unequal, violent, yet most vibrant societies in the world.