David Dabydeen wrote the 14 poems that Slave Song comprises while an undergraduate at Cambridge University. The set of poems won Cambridge University’s Quiller-Couch Prize and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1978. Several individual poems were published before their collective… Read More ›
This poignant and painful poem, one of Agostinho Neto’s longest, documents in stark detail the conditions of life for poor Africans in the shantytowns surrounding Angola’s capital city, Luanda. The poem Sabado nos musseques expresses the anxieties experienced by the… Read More ›
Pre-Morning (Predutro) is the title poem of Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s first book of poetry published after his Collected Poems in 1991. The 11 quatrains that make up the poem are set in a liminal time, when the day is coming into… Read More ›
Prelude (Prélude) is the first poem in René Depestre’s best-known collection, A Rainbow for the Christian West (Un arc-en-ciel pour l’occident chrétien, 1967). It is written in unrhymed free verse and divided into four parts, the last of which is… Read More ›
Over the Roofs of the World (2005) is Jamaican poet Olive Senior’s third collection of poetry. In her second collection, Gardening in the Tropics, a cycle of poems is connected by themes of cultivation and a repeated opening line. In… Read More ›
The poem—divided into stanzas of varying length and written in unrhymed free verse—begins with the refrain, repeated throughout, “At the end of the wee hours . . . ,” as the speaker wakes from a troubled sleep to survey the… Read More ›
Imtiaz Dharker calls herself a Scottish Muslim Calvinist and writes in English. Her No-man’s Land first appeared in her second volume of poetry, Postcards from God. This poem begins with a stark visual image and a hair-raising auditory one: “A… Read More ›
This most famous poem of Faiz Ahmad Faiz (Mujh Se Pehli Si Muhabbat) appears in his collection Naqsh-e-Faryadi (The Picture of a Dissenter), published in 1941, the year that Faiz married Alys George, an English journalist and human rights campaigner… Read More ›
Mahmoud Darwish was born in Palestine when it was a British mandate. At the age of six, he experienced the dispersal of his people upon the birth of the state of Israel (1948). The Palestinians had to flee or accept… Read More ›
“Correspondence,” a short poem by Léopold Sédar Senghor, was first published in Poèmes perdus (Lost Poems), included in his final collection of original poetry, Oeuvre poétique. However, “according to the author’s preface, these poems are not new as such, but… Read More ›
This is the title piece for Achebe’s collection Christmas in Biafra and Other Poems, a joint winner of the first Commonwealth Poetry Prize (1972). The poem graphically depicts the suffering endured by civilians during the bloody Nigerian civil war (1967–70)… Read More ›
Black Woman Naked woman, black woman Clothed with your colour which is life with your form which is beauty! In your shadow I have grown up; the gentleness of your hands was laid over my eyes. And now, high up… Read More ›
“Bargain” (“Solde”), from Damas’s first collection, Pigments (1937), reveals the effects of centuries of exploitation by white European colonials. Damas’s message is even more direct in this poem than in Hiccup; the speaker is an adult who has fully assimilated… Read More ›
Initially, one might read the opening line of this four-stanza poem as a reference to Aimé Césaire’s own recourse to barbarity as a means of violent rebellion: “This [barbarity] is the word that sustains me / and smacks against my… Read More ›
Neruda begins all of Canto General with “Amor America (1400),” in the opening section titled A Lamp of Earth. The significance of the year 1400 is that it marks a time before the arrival of Christopher Columbus or any other… Read More ›
You must be logged in to post a comment.