The Nobel Laureate's reputation as a dramatist tends to cloud his poetic achievement, and in modern African literature, poetry lives in the shadow of fiction. The criticism of Soyinka's poetry has so far centred on his themes of individuality and death, his imagery, and on the controversy over his authenticity, obscurity and difficulty. Here, in a new approach, an academic himself and one of the leading younger generation of African poets, discusses critically the voice and viewpoint of the poet with the object of establishing Soyinka's persona. The book covers the personality and world view of the man, as revealed in his poetry.
This collection brings together Idanre and Other Poems and A Shuttle in the Crypt, two powerful and distinctive volumes of the early poetry of Nobel Prize laureate and Nigerian exile Wole Soyinka. Taken has a whole, Soyinka's early poetry may be viewed as a valiant effort to reconcile the mysterious legacy of the old with the often harsh realities of an entire continent's abrupt entry into the twentieth century.
Within these interviews, Soyinka is forthright, clear and eloquent. He addresses many facets of his writing and plumbs pressing issues of culture, society and community.
'Soyinka's greatest novel ... No one else can write such a book' - Ben Okri 'A high-jinks state-of-the-nation novel' - Chibundu Onuzo A FINANCIAL TIMES AND SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR A towering figure in world literature, Wole Soyinka aims directly at the corridors of power as he warns against corruption both of high office and of the soul, with a dazzling lightness of touch and gleeful irreverence. Much to Doctor Menka's horror, some cunning entrepreneur has decided to sell body parts from his hospital for use in ritualistic practices. Already at the end of his tether from the horrors he routinely sees in surgery, he shares this latest development with his oldest college friend, bon viveur, star engineer and Yoruba royal, Duyole Pitan-Payne, who has never before met a puzzle he couldn't solve. Neither realise how close the enemy is, nor how powerful. Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth is at once a savagely witty whodunit, a scathing indictment of Nigeria's political elite, and a provocative call to arms from one of the country's most relentless political activists and an international literary giant. MORE PRAISE FOR WOLE SOYINKA: 'You don't see the things the same when you encounter a voice like that' - Toni Morrison 'One of the best there is today, a poet and a thinker, who knows both how the world works and how the world should work' - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
This volume contains poems from 1966 to 1989. A Shuttle in the Crypt, written while Soyinka was in prison, maps out the course trodden by a mind under solitary confinement. Idanre, a poem on the creation myth of Ogun, was written for the Commonwealth Arts Festival, while Mandela's Earth presents a selection of poems that are of searing urgency.
