You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Time Came Upon Me and Other Poems (2019) is Mark Nwagwu’s fourth collection of poems dedicated and devoted to his wife, Prof. Helen Onyemazuwa Nwagwu (1943 – 2018). In total, there are 94 poems on various but interconnected subjects, of life and living, love and loving, of aging, death and transcendence, friendships, anniversaries, family scenes and reminiscences and, above all, the overarching and recurring subject of eternal affection of the poet for his wife and life partner.
None
Here is poetry that is personal yet spreading to have its tentacles struggling to grip into other equally slippery facets of life. In brief, Beaton writes his poetry to assuage his personal feelings yet in so doing he ends up massaging our shared experience - as Malawians, Africans and just as humans. Beaton has observed, learnt, and is growing in the Malawian poetry space. Thus, he also comes to the stage bearing the Malawian influence on his poetry.
Richard Inya’s This is Not a Poem as deceptively titled throws up a lot of lines that plaintively probe into the reader’s reasoning and sense of right and wrong. The poems are highly evocative and drum in rhythmic cadence a sort of impatience with our seeming contentment with the anomalies of our society.
Born in Orlando West, Soweto, in Johannesburg, Lesego Rampolokeng is a poet, novelist, playwright, filmmaker and writing teacher who rose to prominence in the 1980s, a turbulent period in South Africa’s history. Originally published in 1999, The Bavino Sermons includes such memorable poems as ‘Lines for Vincent’, ‘Riding the victim train’, ‘To Gil Scott-Heron’, ‘Crab attack’,‘Rap Ranting’ and ‘The Fela Sermon’.
In a whirlwind of local history, contemporary culture, domestic angst, and nostalgia, Thabo Jijana’s debut collection of award-winning poems exhibits an emotional wisdom beyond the writer’s years. Earthen and edgy, musical and minimal, Failing Maths and My Other Crimes is not solely a meditation on family and mortality, nor just a manifesto on the role of art in a young man’s life: beyond all, this collection is a short masterclass in South African storytelling-in-verse.
The best way to understand a people is to live with the people; the best way to live with the people is to share with the people; and the best thing to share with the people is what the people need. The risks and perils of not heeding this age old wisdom are at the heart of Dangerous Pastime.
These deeply felt poems are at once plain-speaking and alive with complexity; Galgut's elegant response to both pain and loveliness is inspiring. Elisa Galgut teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Cape Town. She has a PhD in Philosophy from Rutgers University and a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. Her poetry has appeared in local literary journals and anthologies. She lives in Cape Town.
dear reader, are you still there? take a second, now. breathe // with me. In one of the most anticipated debut collections of recent years, Maneo Mohale reckons boldly with the experience of – and the reconstruction of a life after – a sexual assault. Mohale’s unapologetic and disarming voice carries through a budding and blooming garden of poetics, rooted in a contemporary southern African tradition, but springing forth in queer and radical new directions. Indeed, this is a work encompassing the full, often contradictory, and seldom complete process of healing: where relations must be chosen as well as made; where time becomes non-linear and language insufficient; where nothing is what it seems, yet everything is what it is.
Reviews "This collection of poetry both reflects and creates attitudes that we now regard as characteristic of our age – the crisis of nationhood and the burden of citizenship. Ebi Yeibo’s White Masks unambiguously exposes the dystopian nightmares of a nation and a people’s willing detachment from humanity. While some poets of his generation are content with dreaming of an ideal world, in White Masks, Yeibo, through the resources of memory, experiments with the idea of a better world." Professor Ogaga Okuyade, Niger Delta University, Wilberforce Island, Bayelsa State, Nigeria. "…Ebi Yeibo’s White Masks is a collection inspired by hope. In whichever way it is read, it cannot but inv...