The poetry contained within these pages has been written about everyday life as seen by the author. There are a large variety of subjects, romance, sorrow, philosophy, and more than a sprinkling of nature related poem as the author¡_s rural home setting provides a source of extra inspiration.
Niyi Osundare's latest book of poems, Green: Sighs Of Our Ailing Planet, is a critical pastoral of poems concerning the environment around the world--A poet of renown who has travelled and given performances in many parts of the world, he has felt and tried to put into words what he has felt in what he has seen-from the Amazon to the deserts of North Africa to his home country of Nigeria. For him it was the nature speaking to him and through him, pleading and imploring...but still beautiful? Lushness of destruction, transmuted from a nature endangered....an accessible plea from nature through Osundare's words. A book relevant and hopeful for people to stop and reflect on the endangered beauty of all of nature. In the words of Niyi Osundare: Of all my 20-something books of poetry, none has confronted me with a more challenging combination of urgency of content and complexity of execution than this new one. I daresay the existential imperative of its content has been responsible for the pain that came with its composition and the uneasy relief I now feel upon its completion. There is something deeply spiritual, almost religious, about the mission and the message of the poems, and the many ways they have turned out to be denizens of that vital interface between the ecological and the cosmic...
This Very Short Introduction chronicles the trends and traditions of modern Latin American literature, arguing that Latin American literature developed as a continent-wide phenomenon, not just an assemblage of national literatures, in moments of political crisis. With the Spanish American War came Modernismo, the end of World War I and the Mexican Revolution produced the avant-garde, and the Cuban Revolution sparked a movement in the novel that came to be known as the Boom. Within this narrative, the author covers all of the major writers of Latin American literature, from Andrés Bello and José María de Heredia, through Borges and García Márquez, to Fernando Vallejo and Roberto Bolaño.