Full Description
Togara Muzanenhamo's first collection of poems evokes a number of worlds, familiar and unfamiliar. He takes us from his vivid, vanished childhood in Zimbabwe to Europe, where he lived for some years, making as he goes the stories and connections that coax a meaning out of time and change. These are less poems of memory than of creation. There exists a fractured world, partly hidden from the poet, in which dream makes a different kind of order. This unpredictable, parallel world provides an undertone, a treacherous reflection. "Spirit Brides" combines the real and the surreal, stone and steel on the one hand, and air on the other. The plains of the veldt in Zimbabwe are as tangible as the bookstore in Antwerp or the bottle-shop in Paris. There is a language here that fills some of the troubling silences of our time, that engages death, violence and, most particularly, love.
Contents
Table of Contents
Captain of the Lighthouse
The Pale Saint
Nationalist Archives
Smoke
The Craft
Six Francs Seventy-five
The Pool
The Laughing Wood
Den Haag
Pine Thicket
Views without Buildings
Tea and Sandwiches
The Dawn Chorus
Roads
The Boy Who Ate Clouds for Tea
The Small Room
The Shape of a Thousand Things
Skaters
Late Night and the Road
Helpless Goodbyes
Excursion
The Armchair
The Ornithologist's Daughter
Leaves
Chemins Perdus
The Slide
Half Untold
Epworth
The Spirit Brides
Arguments Left
Pallbearer
Petals
Monday Men
The Conductor
Man in the Bowler Hat
Skin-box
The Red Room
Strangers
The Last Days of Winter
Lineage
Photographer
Tomorrow
Oxygen
Aubade
Gumiguru
