Afrikanische Lyrik

For P. R. Anderson, poetry is "language equipping us as itself at the frontier of the unspeakable". Night Transit is such a volume, confronting the dark before and after life. There are poems of travel that take on an existential dimension and also poems of mythopoeic origin, memoirs of South Africa in the 1980s and after, and poems of witness and advocacy in the current ecocide. Whether it is love or death that axiomatically stirs up the poetry, Anderson sees into the cloudy transit with clear and original eyes. These poems range from a consideration of the fourth war of resistance at what is now Makhanda to the care of insects as populations collapse across the planet. Anderson considers the project of poetry, and recalls the euphoria of transit and relocation in an epoch of anguish, yearning and crisis.

I can, said the creator, I can / offer, he said, only a life. Just / the spark to the starter motor, / a puff, a squeak and I'm done. / Life is all I can give you. Haven't / you realised that I'm an experimenter, / not an insurance salesman? So you / see, survival, survival is up to you; / it's your adventure. I can't guarantee / silk stockings, an apartment in Manhattan, / or pure intentions. But here's a word of / advice: don't put too much store in the words of / politicianseconomistsparentsteachersbossesexpertsbureaucratsmarketers, / they're purveyors of an obscene accumulation of / useless cant...

A SENSUOUS EXPLORATION OF LOVE IN ALL ITS GLORYThe Lament captures the full range of emotion that whirl around human relationships. Here are dozens of poems examining the profound joy of those deeply in love, the incredible longing of the separated partner, the intense loneliness of modern working life, and - above all - the indisputable necessity of connecting with people around us. Poet Ercell H. Hoffman casts a penetrating gaze on our everyday emotions, revealing our extraordinary capacity for feeling, empathy, and love. IN "Lost to the Moment," the speaker relishes the irreplaceable first blush of fledgling love that sweets through her body "like a cool summer breeze." "This Afternoon" explores the painful possibilities of a love that might have been - that 'I knew could not blossom." "Stay Heart Stay" is about the undying fire for another that refuses to be extinguished despite considerable hurdles. Meanwhile, other poems examine relationships in the contemporary workplace, revealing a deeply unsatisfying existence: "The Factory" looks at the peculiarly disconnected relationships among underappreciated factory workers, while "On the JOB" tackles the boredom of a career that's anything but busy. Chock full of penetrating insights into the hart, The Lames is about our most basic needs: finding and keeping love and obeying our inner truth.

A collection of poems, photographs and mediations from South African writer abu bakr solomons. Abu Bakr Solomons is a retired teacher-principal who has worked in primary and high schools in the townships of Cape Town for 40 years. He was the Chairperson of the Congress of South African Writers in 1990-91. He was awarded a fellowship to pursue research in African literature at Northwestern University in Chicago in 1992. In 1993 he was invited to participate in the Salzburg Seminar in Austria. His work has been published in COSAW journals, a Botsotso publication and two Sol Plaatje-European Union anthologies.

In this book of poems, the poet speaks in a confident tone of apocalyptic utterances: advising, warning, denouncing, protesting, and lamenting. This long poem has the twin virtues of relevance and clarity of diction. The poet willfully eschews the irksome ineloquence and syntactic sophistry characteristic of traditional poetry. He adopts the tone of African Guardians of the Word, the griots. Passion, energy, and incisive irony are the hallmarks of this didactic work.

With exquisite clarity and poise, Nondwe Mpuma's debut collection guides us through dreamscapes of ritual, harvest and destitution - of tornado-stricken villages, mythical beings, and the eternally evanescent promise of love. Grounded by understated and precise verse, Mpuma weaves together the spiritual and the natural with effortless, imagistic flair. In Peach Country there is celebration, mourning, meditation, prayer, exploration, impatience and joy; throughout, however, Mpuma maintains an open-eyed wonder at the entirety of existence, viewed from her particular, and particularly enchanting, corner of the world.

In this collection, Joseph Matose asks how the world of the living is seen and remembered by those who have died. To answer his question, he presents a range of voices - glad and sorrowful, expectant and frustrated, truthful and untruthful, lascivious, gossipy, dreamlike, ironic, cynical, moral, religious, and even claiming to be wise - purporting to come from the residents of graveyards. Between them, they paint a picture of human affairs they can observe, imagine or remember but - crucially - can no longer take part in or influence. A world in which, although letters and words - the poet's own tools - must be prized, they also represent the medium of lies and inaccuracies preserved on gravestones or uttered by those left behind. A world where widows and widowers too-readily relinquish faithfulness and devotion, politicians are not to be trusted, and men commit violence on wives. Nevertheless, through all these voices an overall message of hope can - just about - be heard: the poems also cite much that is to be appreciated in human life and human affairs, and end with a heartfelt celebration of the greatness of Nelson Mandela. - Phil Vernon

Bury Me Naked is driven by its hard-hitting language, accessible images, and depth of feeling. The poems are set in the poet's home village of KwaGezubuso, and show the tough life of young people in South Africa's neglected rural areas. Many poems are religious, with a respectful but irreverent attitude to God.

An ocean of floodwater. Shipwrecked toddlers. Skeletons that rise from pristine beaches. In his second book of poems, Nick Mulgrew confronts the natural and human disasters of the eastern South African coast - and, in the process, himself. An unflinching examination of ancestry and place, of ruined childhoods and a troubled present, The Book of Unrest conjures a world of alternating beauty and horror; a series of tainted land-, city and seascapes, increasingly hostile to those living in them. Drawing upon the wisdom of other Durban writers, Mulgrew interrogates the purposes of poetry and politics in such a fraught time and place. Can our traumas be learned from, or do they only shackle us to the past? In turns elegiac and nihilistic, witty and desperate, sprawling and precise, these poems sift through personal and collective histories of mistrust and violence, to find what, if anything, can bring us rest.

I have crossed landsWearing dark crownsWhere the sun should be.from 'Glow'Marial Awendit dares to dream and to share his dreams, drawing us into a world of searing contrasts - fire and water, beauty and ugliness, love and rage, darkness and light, war and resistance, God and the devil. In the process he considers profound, existential questions. What is the purpose of suffering? How do we define freedom? Can hope flower from pain? Surreal images leap off the page to startle our perceptions and embed themselves in our consciousness. The poems reverberate with a haunting musicality, floating like water lilies on the Nile, pulsing like flames in the desert night.- Marian ChristieMarial Awenditis a South Sudanese poet, essayist and songwriter, widely published in various literary magazines and anthologies.He is the author of:The poetry chapbook, The Night Does Not Drown Us, Babishai-Niwe Poetry FoundationHis debut poetry collection, Keeping the Sun Secret, Mwanaka Media and Publishing Ltd.Marial won the 2016 South Sudan Youth Talent Awardfor the category of Best Poet and the 2018 Babishai-Niwe Poetry Award.This collection of poems journals the poet's transition from darkness into light. The author talks of his coming into the world many years after his birth. Such conversion is what he calls a brewing dawn. The resurrection from despair into hope, faith in God and arrangements for a journey into a brighter light, are wielded by the poems. The author tells his story using various themes, in a familiar manner, yet some of the pieces spell the exact environs of the author. Some poems carry the writer's attempts to brighten the way towards hope, for others.

In Best New African Poets 2021 Anthology there are 18 French speaking African poets from DRC, Congo Brazzaville, Cameroun, Ivory Coast, Benin, Togo, Chad, Senegal, Comoros and more... 14 Portuguese speaking poets from Angola, Sao Tome and Principe, Mozambique and 63 English speaking African poets from among other countries, South Africa, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Uganda, Malawi, Swaziland, Lesotho, Zambia, Tanzania, Ghana, Gambia, Sierra Leone.A full gamut of issues is dissected, from love, marriage, relationships, spirituality, politics, culture, tradition, environmentalism, and the interstellar etc. Included are two collaborations: the first deals with marriage, juxtaposing Monogamy vs Polygamy with the 21th century lived experience; the second imagines humanity living as intergalactic beings. The poets were asked to be imaginative (to be fictional poets), to try to create and imagine human agency in this interstellar civilization approaching.There is also featured 5 group interviews with 5 previous contributors to this series. These interviews were interactive and collaborative, with largely the BNAP groups interviewing a poet, critically engaging with their work and discussing the literary and social aspects the poetry addressed. And lastly 4 reviews of African poetry.

By highlighting and teasing out the mingled emotions of anxiety, disenchantment, hope and anger which characterise South Africans' current experienced reality, Sole's poetry questions and expands on our concerns about identity and belonging. In so doing, the poems in Skin Rafts contemplate the relationships that exist between us on a number of seemingly discrete, but actually intertwined, fronts - the personal relationship between lovers; the wider social and political relationships between human beings; as well as the problematic and contested human relationships that are brought to bear on land, landscape and the non-human. In this collection the reader is confronted with the circumstance that both body and society exist in a fragile dimension of uncertainty, where we all are 'bobbing / on our raft of skin'.

Obaluaye is a poetry collection for the things that plague us. Obaluaye is a Yoruba god of infirmities and healing. The poems in this book talk of cradles and graves and every experience in-between, employing the duality attribute of the Orisha of epidemics. Each poem is an experience of health and death wrapped in a pod, of strength and flaws and a thirst for things that elude.This collection explores the human cycle-the routine of life and death (and a possibility of restoration, rebirth). It seeks to understand the things that haunt us-our fears, our nightmares, quest for freedom, the weight of responsibilities, the paradox of hope, devotion and betrayals, failed states and the covid-19 pandemic. Obaluaye is a realization that "life is a cocktail of sweet, sour and insipid" and we are born to run this cycle, reaching for light, reaching for freedom...that ultimately leads to the grave.

An Obeisance to Frogs, is Robin Winckel Mellish's third poetry collection. In these pieces the contrast between the natural worlds of South Africa and Europe are brought into sharp focus, and her eye for detail and emotional connectedness to place and people are especially highlighted. The poems cross thresholds between animals, love and finally The Kaggen cycle, which is rich in mythology both personal and cultural. These poems offer up a precise honouring of the wild, with a deeply felt sense of attachment to a planet in peril.

IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award™ gold winner, poetry category<BR><BR> Sierra Leone’s devastating civil war barely caught the attention of Western media, but it raged on for over a decade, bringing misery to millions of people in West Africa from 1991 to 2002. The atrocities committed in this war and the accounts of its survivors were duly recorded by international organizations, but they run the risk of being consigned to dusty historical archives. <BR>  <BR> Derived from public testimonies at a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Freetown, this remarkable poetry collection aims to breathe new life into the records of Sierra Leone’s civil war, delicately extracting heartbreaking human stories from the morass of legal jargon. By rendering selected trial transcripts in poetic form, Shanee Stepakoff finds a novel way to communicate not only the suffering of Sierra Leone’s people, but also their courage, dignity, and resilience. Her use of innovative literary techniques helps to ensure that the voices of survivors are not forgotten, but rather heard across the world. <BR>  <BR> This volume also includes an introduction that explores how the genre of “found poetry” can serve as a uniquely powerful means through which writers may bear witness to atrocity. This book’s unforgettable excavation and shaping of survivor testimonies opens new possibilities for speaking about the unspeakable.

Mapfumo Clement Chihota is a Zimbabwean poet and short-story writer. His creative works have been published Zimbabwe, South Africa, the USA and the United Kingdom in anthologies or journals such as No More Plastic Balls and other Stories (co-edited with Robert Muponde); Writing Still; Writing Now; New Coin Poetry; Tripwire Journal of Poetics; The Warwick Reviewand Where to Now? Short Stories from Zimbabwe. Mapfumo currently teaches into Community and Human Services programs at Federation University in Melbourne, Australia. The collection Before the Next Song and other Poems was initially published by Mambo Press Publishers in 1999. It has been used as an 'A level' literature set book in Zimbabwean secondary schools.

Paperback

In this, one of his most moving collections John Eppel is at the peak of his poetic powers. His speaker is a wizened soul, mindful of time and mortality, contemplating the cycle of life, the moon and the stars, clouds and rain, rocks, soil, tree, flowers, dogs, cats, birds, toads, spiders, termites and a tiny virus bringing us death. Also featured are beggars, schoolboys, literature and art legends, sons and daughters, grandparents and grandchildren. John Eppel gives a symphony of words about 'our brief eternity.

OH, THE WEBS WE WEAVE...For his seventh poetry collection, Tolu' has turned his attention to that old adage -no one in a writer's life may have secrets.A vibrant, human exploration of the way in which words and deeds connect all of us, and the tiniest movements which span out across continents.Tolu' writes powerfully on family, love, loss, and with a scorching curiosity for the world around us. His readers will be familiar with his inimitable style, and this latest collection does not disappoint.