Vote rigging, voter apathy, intimidations, biased reporting, hubristic political leaders, political gerrymandering, a confused world, and a tired and timid electorate: add to this the decay or death of every governance system or structure in Zimbabwe alongside an economy that is all but dead. These are the issues addressed in this poetry collection Mad Bob Republic. Is there an end to Zimbabwe’s problems? The poet contributes to ongoing discourses on the country.
The pastor preach, the congregates bleach....here the artist is called to question the essence of morality in the wake of moral decadence. When the people speak and the superiors they speak to, take a dive deep into the questionable pools, the people speak to question, here the artist is called to sing. When the sun denies us the lustre at anticipated times, when the moon submits to darkness before we see the road awaiting us...we paint the pictures to depict the terrain and ask a question or plenty. When the land we have cannot make a home for us.... Unfathomably so, everybody wants to know how i lost the brighter shades of my skin colour to the political machinations of the Addis Ababa parliament. Verily I say; those are the Shades of Black for you.
Gabriel Awuah Mainoo is an award winning writer, a tennis professional, lyricist and playwright studying at the University of Cape Coast whose poem ‘Taunt’ won best satire of the year 2017 on VOAP: Voices of African poets. He serves as project manager to Ghana writes literary group and creative editor to WGM: Writers Global Movement magazine. His first published work ‘Afri-lad’ appeared on YMCA, 2016. Mainoo is an international anthologized poet who has featured on several journals, he is a contributor to Best New African Poets 2018, Bodies & Scars anthology, and poetry leaves bound volume among others. His next projects are three collections: ‘60 Aces of Haiku’, ‘Lyrical Textiles’ and ‘Chicken Wings’, a Christmas haiku. Many of his works, sometimes esoteric are well-known for their wonderful lyrical propensity and spontaneity. Critics affirm that his remarkable weave of words marks him as the ‘Lyricist Extraordinaire’.
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.
Poems in Revolution Recollected and New Struggle Poems deal with, among other issues, the North African uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and intersects into the Middle East conflicts in Syria, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and the never ending conflict between Israel and Palestine. These poems previously came out under Revolution: Struggle Poems, published in 2015, and the rest of the poems are from my latest poetry collection I am currently working on entitled Disobedience Poems. Tendai Rinos Mwanaka is a Zimbabwean publisher, editor, mentor, thinker, literary artist, visual artist and musical artist with over 40 books published. He writes in English and Shona.
The Rhythm of Life is a record breaking book written in rhyme. It covers many facets of life, bent on the lessons, methods, and realities of life. Ngozi Olivia Osuoha is a poet, writer, thinker, and hymnist. She has published seventeen poetry books, including one co-written. She has featured in over sixty five international anthologies, and has also published over two hundred and fifty poems and articles in over twenty countries.
The first thing you will meet in this collection is experimentation and innovativeness in the writing. Poets should be scientists by experimenting with forms, styles, with subject matter too, they should continuously try to find new ways of writing, to problematicise what we have always taken for granted. The second issue is how we understand and critically dissect that point where art criticism and actual art can meet in the poetic form. The third issue is how irreverently the poet treates issues to do with the meaning of words, what words are, how he creates new words, what numbers are, the state of voice, language, thoughts, dreams, perspectives, life, race, death, dreams, spirituality, love etc… The fourth issue is the storytelling tradition that is strong in this collection; the poet is saying poets are also storytellers, who tell a story in condensed form with depth of thought and feeling. The fifth important aspect is defiance. The poet refuses to settle on anything, to accept anything, he is a literary rebel with language, no subject is taboo. A Portfolio of Defiance defiantly looks at the world before voice and the world after voice, and the worlds in between. What will human beings be without voice? Even nothingness has a voice!
In ‘The Curse’ we see the existential dilemmas that the characters have to deal with in their day to day life on hard planet earth. These recurring dilemmas become the leitmotiv of the whole collection. The poet uses literary figures and philosophical terms that connect with past literature like Sisyphus, Nirvana, quixotic, The Pied Piper, Spartans, Jim Crow etc. in his poems to show us the situations his characters are going through, likening them to these past literary figures and their stories. In ‘Coming of Age’, the poem that informs this collection and titular to the collection, he talks of the ghetto being, his journey as he tried to break the cycle of poverty and vault himself out of the ghetto and the political situation that weighs heavily on this being. How this being comes of age in the scourge of this time. This is an important and well assembled beautiful collection of poetry of the Zimbabwean struggle.
His eagle eyes scan beyond the boundaries of his native Zimbabwe to right the crookedness of men with dubious ideals and reckless twists in lands abroad. Caressing his Lenovo mistress upon a night, he relives in recorded poesy, memories of victims of corruption and the false memoirs of looters of the land. A Letter to the President, is a collection of his experimental poetry. Here is the man on a mission and with a mission. Words are slings and rocks on his quiver. Tireless and resilient; no ugliness is too ugly to stay below his radar. His weapon of choice is his pen. Dipped in acid, as he says, no thug escapes the roast of his laser beam that put them on the spot light.
Smeetha Bhoumik is an artist celebrating her deep engagement with poetry. Her main theme of work is the Universe Series, exploring the mystery, oneness and unifying energies of the universe in oils and new media, shown in national and international exhibitions.
