POSTCOLONIAL POETRY

ARUN KOLATKAR

Audacious is the first word that comes to mind when reading an Arun Kolatkar poem. He wasn’t the most popular
poet in Maharashtra, but much of his fame can be credited to the liberal use of expletives in his work.

Born in 1932, in Kolhapur, Maharashtra, Kolatkar grew up in a home that he described as “a house of cards — the
rooms had mud floors which had to be plastered with cow dung every week to keep them in good repair”. He
enrolled in the JJ School of Arts in 1949 and finished his diploma in 1957.

A graphic designer by profession, he earned his reputation in the advertising world and it wasn’t until the 1960s
that he began to write. Kolatkar, with his ‘two-headed pencil’, was one of the pioneers of modern poetry in India.
His work is reflective of other contemporary poets such as Vilas Sarang, Dilip Chitre and Vinda Karandikar. A
critique of a post-colonial India, combined with a dark humour, was an unmatched skill he possessed.

On his 15th death anniversary, ThePrint revisits Kolatkar’s starkly riveting poetic landscape.

Kolatkar’s work stems purely from observation as he sat for 15 years, every Thursday afternoon at Wayside Inn
Cafe in the Kala Ghoda area of Mumbai. A prolific writer in both Marathi and English, he was a recluse and while
he wrote many poems, most of them saw the light of day only towards the end of his life. For the longest time,
Jejuri was his only publicly available collection.

Jejuri was described by academic Anjali Nerlekar as an “amazing series of poems on the temple town in
Maharashtra where the poet rips apart the hypocrisy and cant of the powerful Brahmins with their vice-like hold
on the religion and underscores the anachronism of this religion in the modern world”.

It earned him the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1976.

He was diagnosed with cancer in the late 1990s, following which he released four more books in the final two
years of his life. In 2003, he released Bhijki Vahi and Chirimiri in Marathi — the former won him the Sahitya
Akademi Award in 2004. The following year he released Dron, also in Marathi, along with Sarpa Satra and Kala
Ghoda Poems in English.

THE PRIEST BY ARUN KOLATKAR

An offering of heel and haunch

on the cold altar of the culvert wall
the priest waits.

Is the bus a little late?

The priest wonders.
Will there be a puran poli on his plate?

With a quick intake of testicles

at the touch of the rough cut, dew drenched stone
he turns his head in the sun

to look at the long road winding out of sight

with the eventlessness
of the fortune line on a dead man's palm.

The sun takes up the priest's head

and pats his cheek
familiarly like the village barber.
The bit of betel nut
turning over and over on his tongue
is a mantra.

It works.
The bus is no more just a thought in the head.
It's now a dot in the distance

and under his lazy lizard stare

it begins to grow
slowly like a wart upon his nose.

With a thud and a bump

the bus takes a pothole as it rattles past the
priest
and paints his eyeballs blue.

The bus goes round in a circle.

Stops inside the bus station and stands
purring softly in front of the priest.

A catgrin on its face

and a live, ready to eat pilgrim
held between its teeth.

A LOW TEMPLE BY ARUN KOLATKAR

A low temple keeps its gods in the dark.

You lend a matchbox to the priest.
One by one the gods come to light.

Amused bronze. Smiling stone. Unsurprised.

For a moment the length of a matchstick
gesture after gesture revives and dies.
Stance after lost stance is found
and lost again.

Who was that, you ask.

The eight-arm goddess, the priest replies.
A sceptic match coughs.
You can count.
But she has eighteen, you protest.
All the same she is still an eight-arm goddess to the priest.

You come out in the sun and light a charminar.

Children play on the back of the twenty-foot tortoise.

AN OLD WOMAN BY ARUN KOLATKAR

An old woman grabs

hold of your sleeve
and tags along.

She wants a fifty paise coin.

She says she will take you
to the horseshoe shrine.
You’ve seen it already.
She hobbles along anyway
and tightens her grip on your shirt

She won’t let you go.

You know how old women are.
They stick to you like a burr.

You turn around and face her

with an air of finality.
You want to end the farce.

When you hear her say,

‘What else can an old woman do
on hills as wretched as these?’

You look right at the sky.

Clear through the bullet holes
she has for her eyes.

And as you look on,

the cracks that begin around her eyes
spread beyond her skin.

And the hills crack.

And the temples crack.
And the sky falls

With a plate-glass clatter

Around the shatterproof crone
who stands alone

And you are reduced

to so much small change
in her hand.

INTRODUCTION
Arun Kolatkar is the poet of the poem, “An Old Woman.” The poem is about encountering clinging old women
when visiting a shrine or religious place. This poem depicts an old woman in a totally different vision, as the poet
discovers her with a unique outlook owing to the woman’s demeanour and her words.

He comes across this woman, fragile yet fierce in her gaze. For a fifty paise coin, she asks him to take her service
to tour around the horseshoe shrine. Though the speaker first wants to dismiss her, she persists, and he finally
recognizes her strong desire to earn a respectful life on her own. Eventually, his perspective shifts.

ABOUT THE POET

Arun Kolatkar (1932-2004) was educated and employed as a graphic artist in Mumbai. Kolatkar, a
Commonwealth Poetry Prize recipient, has written to ‘Kavi,’ ‘Opinion Literary Review,’ ‘New Writing in India,’ and
‘The Shell and The Rain,’ among other publications. He is a poet who is bilingual and has also translated Marathi
poetry. This poem is from his book ‘Jejuri,’ which contains a compilation of his poetry.

THEME
In this poem, the visitor’s impression of the woman as someone who just pestered the tourists for money has
transformed. He realizes that despite witnessing a catastrophe, this woman prefers to earn her life on her own.
The poem ends on a note that, no one can be taken for granted.

STRUCTURE
The poem is structured into 11 stanzas that are made up of irregular tercets. A tercet is a three-line stanza which
may or may not consist of a rhyming pattern. The length of the lines may contain a single word or multiple words.
There is no particular rhyme pattern in the poem “An Old Woman.” However, in stanza 10, the words crone and
alone create a rhyme.

The poetry is summarized by grouping together a few stanzas.

STANZA 1-4
An old woman grabs
hold of your sleeve
and tags along.

She wants a fifty paise coin.

She says she will take you
to the horseshoe shrine.

You’ve seen it already.

She hobbles along anyway
and tightens her grip on your shirt

She won’t let you go.

You know how old women are.
They stick to you like a burr.

An old lady grabs the sleeve of a tourist and follows him. A ‘fifty paise coin’ is what she wants. She promises to
show him ‘the horseshoe shrine’ in exchange for the coin. The traveller walks away since he has already seen the
shrine. The elderly woman ‘tightens her grip’ and ‘hobbles’ along, refusing to give up. She is determined. She
clings to him like a prickly seed pod that clings to clothing, a ‘burr.’

STANZA 5- 7
You turn around and face her
with an air of finality.
You want to end the farce.
When you hear her say,
‘What else can an old woman do
on hills as wretched as these?’

You look right at the sky.

Clear through the bullet holes
she has for her eyes.

Annoyed by her persistence, the traveller chooses to ‘end the farce’ with an ‘air of finality,’ declaring that he would
not submit to her and, as a result, putting an end to the ‘farce.’ He believes that his hard-headed response will
drive her off. But the old woman’s statement – ‘what else could an old woman do to survive on these wretched
hills’ – hits the narrator like a flash of light. The narrator is able to ‘see’ her up close because of the harsh truth
that confronts him. He is taken aback when he turns to gaze at her face. He discovers that his eyes are like deep
‘bullet holes.’

STANZA 8-11
And as you look on,
the cracks that begin around her eyes
spread beyond her skin.

And the hills crack.

And the temples crack.
And the sky falls
With a plateglass clatter
around the shatterproof crone
who stands alone.

And you are reduced

to so much small change
in her hand.

Her skin is wrinkly, and cracks around her eyes and her skin appeared to grow. Everything seemed to be
crumbling around him. The atmosphere then undergoes a tremendous change. A disaster has occurred. The sky
descends as the hills collapse, the temples break. The old woman, on the other hand, stands as a symbol of all-
around deterioration.

The pilgrim undergoes an emotional transfiguration at the very same moment when the woman stands alone. He
is embarrassed. He has been reduced to a smidgen (tiny bit) of change in the heartland. His self-esteem is
diminished as a result of this understanding. The image of the woman as someone who is only harassing the
tourists for money has altered in the mind of the speaker.

He now realizes that this woman is strongly determined and prefers to earn her life on her own. His spiritual
awakening to the ‘real’ world makes him feel ‘insignificant,’ much like the penny in her palm. The end of the poem
asserts that not a single person must be judged or taken for granted.

SCRATCH BY ARUN KOLATKAR

what is god
and what is stone
the dividing line
if it exists
is very thin
at jejuri
and every other stone
is god or his cousin

there is no crop
other than god
and god is harvested here
around the year
and round the clock
out of the bad earth
and the hard rock

that giant hunk of rock

the size of a bedroom
is khandoba's wife turned to stone
the crack that runs right across
is the scar from his broadsword
he struck her down with
once in a fit of rage

scratch a rock
and a legend springs

YESHWANT RAO BY ARUN KOLATKAR

Are you looking for a god?

I know a good one.
His name is Yeshwant Rao
and he's one of the best.
look him up
when you are in Jejuri next.

Of course he's only a second class god

and his place is just outside the main temple.
Outside even of the outer wall.
As if he belonged
among the tradesmen and the lepers.

I've known gods

prettier faced
or straighter laced.
Gods who soak you for your gold.
Gods who soak you for your soul.
Gods who make you walk
on a bed of burning coal.
Gods who put a child inside your wife.
Or a knife inside your enemy.
Gods who tell you how to live your life,
double your money
or triple your land holdings.
Gods who can barely suppress a smile
as you crawl a mile for them.
Gods who will see you drown
if you won't buy them a new crown.
And although I'm sure they're all to be praised,
they're either too symmetrical
or too theatrical for my taste.

Yeshwant Rao,
mass of basalt,
bright as any post box,
the shape of protoplasm
or king size lava pie
thrown against the wall,
without an arm, a leg
or even a single head.

Yeshwant Rao.
He's the god you've got to meet.
If you're short of a limb,
Yeshwant Rao will lend you a hand
and get you back on your feet.

Yeshwant Rao
Does nothing spectacular.
He doesn't promise you the earth
Or book your seat on the next rocket to heaven.
But if any bones are broken,
you know he'll mend them.
He'll make you whole in your body
and hope your spirit will look after itself.
He is merely a kind of a bone-setter.
The only thing is,
as he himself has no heads, hands and feet,
he happens to understand you a little better.

A.K. RAMANUJAN

Poet, translator, folklorist, and philologist A.K. Ramanujan was born in Mysore, India. He earned degrees at the
University of Mysore and Deccan College in Pune and a PhD from Indiana University. Ramanujan wrote in both
English and Kannada, and his poetry is known for its thematic and formal engagement with modernist
transnationalism. Issues such as hybridity and transculturation figure prominently in such collections as Second
Sight (1986), Selected Poems (1976), and The Striders (1966). The Collected Poems of A.K. Ramanujan (1995)
received a Sahitya Akademi Award after the author’s death.

As a scholar, Ramanujan contributed to a range of disciplines, including linguistics and cultural studies. His essay
“Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?” proposed a notion of “context-sensitive” thinking based in complex
situational understandings of identity that differed significantly from Western thought and its emphasis on
universal concepts and structures. Context-sensitive thinking influenced Ramanujan as a folklorist as well. His
works of scholarship include A Flowering Tree and Other Oral Tales from India (1997), Folktales from India: A
Selection of Oral Tales from Twenty-Two Languages (1991), and The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a
Classical Tamil Anthology (1967).

For much of his career, Ramanujan taught at the University of Chicago, where he helped develop the South Asian
studies program. In 1976, the Indian government honored him with the title Padma Shri, the fourth-highest civilian
award in the country. Ramanujan also received a MacArthur Fellowship. The South Asia Council of the
Association for Asian Studies awards the A.K. Ramanujan Book Prize for Translation in honor of his contributions
to the field.

ON THE DEATH OF A POEM BY A.K. RAMANUJAN

Images consult
one
another

a conscience
stricken
jury

and come
slowly
to a sentence.

Each and every hungry and homeless soul

within a mile of the little island
is soon gravitating towards it

to receive the sacrament of idli,

to anoint palates
with sambar,

to celebrate anew, every morning,

the seduction and death
of the demon of hunger

(threatening the entire world)

at the hands of Gauri
in the form of a humble idli.

They come from all over;

walking, running, dancing, limping, stumbling, rolling
each at his own speed.

For, yes, it's breakfast time at Kala Ghoda

as elsewhere
in and around Bombay

The little vamp, the grandma, the blind man,

the ogress,
the rat-poison man,

the pinwheel boy,

the hipster queen of the crossroads,
the Demosthenes of Kala Ghoda,

the pregnant queen of tarts,

the laughing Buddha,
the knucklebones champ

the island slowly begins to fill up.

Not just with the children
and the grandchildren of the banyan

and their cats and dogs,

but with all their friends and cousins as well,
from near and far.

ANALYSIS OF THE POEM

The whole process of poetic creation is presented in such lean and striking linguistic space.
At the source and core of the poetic process, the poet enshrines the intimate conclave of
consulting images. This personal and core experience for the poet is one of severe
ideological, aesthetic and moral conflicts as the second stanza implies. But, as each of the
"images" in the poetic "jury" arrives at the value judgment and linguistic consensus, they
narrow down on their choices. That forces the "jury" into the verdict of a linguistic necessity
and finality of grammatical sentence in the final line.

This can also be a kind of final judgment in the sense of sentencing. This resolution and
closure of the poetic process for practical as well as linguistic purposes becomes a judgment
close to a capital punishment for Ramanujan's persona. And that is what the readers are told
boldly in the title, although the thrust of the poem seems to argue a different perspective on
the birth and status of a poem. A poem in a tidy grammatical sentence as an art object is a
dead poem, if it does not open up without closure for others to share in, contribute and
deviate from. In a way, Ramanujan's text may be trying to contest the exclusive authority and
privilege either of the critical discerner in the poet or of the advocate for the institution of
critical hegemony. This way Ramanujan may be exploring the possibility of a much more
process-oriented non-canonical and thereby secular as well as democratic practice and theory
of poetry. Because, as Bruce King observes, "such completeness kills the experience of the
images operating on each other15." It is as if Ramanujan wants to hold and propose the view
that "The poem is a process of images operating upon each other before being given a fixed
order and interpretation."

Here the persona of Ramanujan plays the devil's advocate. 'On the Death of a Poem' can be a
poetic warning to the politics of linguistic hegemony taming and taking over a possible
secular poetic process. Instead of sanitizing, the poet problemetises the complicity and the
politics of linguistic choices in the context of the poetic form. So a secular aesthetics would
seem to need a continual commitment to a language that does not leave the street of constant
contact with the subaltern and the changing times.
However, Ramanujan did not ridicule poor Indian cousins the way Nissim Ezekiel did in his
Very Indian Poems in Indian English. It is also true that in Second Sight he has not taken the
focused political stand of an Arun Kolatkar in favour of the dispossessed and the exploited as
the true "masters" of "the city". In Kala Ghoda Poems, Kolatkar's poetic persona, the Pi-dog's
ironic and Tiresian vision admirably and justifiably locates the heart and soul of the city of
Mumbai in the subaltern and secular communion of the underdogs representing every
possible colour, gender, caste, and race living off the street and on the street.

Nevertheless, in 'On the Death of a Poem' Ramanujan did "things with the syntax" and
imagery that brought his poetic language "alive in rich and strange ways". In that sense at
least, the language used in his poetry has contributed in some measure to a different level of
"biriyanization", to go back to Ali's metaphor.

The the critical exegesis of these two poems substantiates the secular possibilities of
Ramanujan's use of poetic language. As Ramanujan himself has sarcastically put it, the
Kamasutra, "literally a grammar of love", declines and conjugates "men and women as one
would nouns and verbs in different genders, voices, moods and aspects." In a similar way, the
grammar of a secular aesthetics can inflect and inform the sources of Ramanujan's poetic
themes and concerns, the dynamics of his poetic language and imagery, the dialectics of his
voices and visions. So the quality of his poetic language adds also to the overall strength of
the secular aesthetics imagination Ramanujan's poetry aims at in terms of its worldview,
political charge and authorial process. Theoretically speaking, in the context of Indian Poetry
in English, Ramanujan's Secular aesthetic has subverted and exposed the orientalist and the
upper-class predilections of a Sanskritic aesthetic tradition predicated on the primacy of the
classical Indian ethos or the 'Great Tradition'; it can also challenge and withstand the
formalist and urban-centric linguistic standard and the consequent exclusions of a
"Sacramental" aesthetic trend of a supposedly globalised literary taste and global English.

Moreover, the Secular Aesthetic model emerging from Ramanujan's poetry can make poetry
appreciation and criticism much more relevant to the Indian context and can provide one of
the meaningful pedagogic alternatives for literature studies. It is relevant to our cultural and
political context today, where native / regional literatures, subaltern literatures, Dalit and
Women's writings have claimed their mainstream presence.

NO FIFTH MAN BY A.K. RAMANUJAN

Then there is the story

of five brahmans
who go abroad to learn
all the sixty four arts.

When they meet again

in the woods outside
their town, of course
they want to show off.

The first man picks up a bone

at random, not suspecting
it's a tiger's femur,
and blows syllables on it,

surprises himself
by having on his hands
a tiger's skeleton,
when the second man

does his thing: gives it

liver, lungs, arteries
inferior and superior, veins
blue and red fountaining
out of a heart, paws,
claws, a mouthful of fangs, a womb
and a gender though
it's still a sorry thing

looks flayed
though it has never known a skin
makes a tiger, a tiger,
fire and velvet,

that pelt of stripes

and gold, which is what
the third brahman give it,
crowing almost with glee.

Now, there!
stood a tiger on all fours
on the forest floor, shawled
with the dotted shade,

about to spring if only

its heart could beat,
its eye could see,
its mouth could water.

Engendered, lifelike but

incapable, as it stood
still, a mere effigy,
it could neither live nor die.

The fourth brahman knew how

to breathe life into it,
was about to do so
when the fifth one,

their boyhood buddy

who had learned nothing,
suddenly said, 'Stop:
Don't. It may eat us all up.'

The fourth one said,

'Of course, I'm giving it life.
I'm its papa. This is
my pussycat. Just watch'.

The fifth man, the coward,

cried, ' Wait, wait
just one second',
and climbed up a tree in a hurry

while the fourth chanted a mantra,

gave the tigress life,
death, a heartbeat,
an eye for prey and
a raging hunger all
at once inspiring
terror in beauty, changing
a nothing into a thing never before,

and the creature pounced on him,

his three friends rooted
in their fear, killed them all
and ate them up for starters.

Nothing was left of them,

Not even a bone.
Poetry too is a tigress,
except there's no fifth
man left on a tree
when she takes your breath
away.

RETURNING BY A.K. RAMANUJAN

Returning home one blazing afternoon,

he looked for his mother everywhere,
She wasn’t in the kitchen, she wasn’t
in the backyard, she wasn’t anywhere.

He looked and looked, grew frantic,

looked even under the beds, where he found
old shoes and dustballs, but not his mother.
He ran out of the house, shouting, Amma!

Where are you? I’m home! I’m hungry!

But there was no answer, not even an echo
in the deserted street blazing with sunshine.
Suddenly he remembered he was now sixty-one
and he hadn’t had a mother for forty years.

Returning’ is a poem written by A.K.Ramanujan- an outstanding Indo-

Anglian poet. He was a folklorist, literary critic, translator, and a cultural
historian. In this poem, like his poetry, he displays a mastery of diction as well
as craftsmanship. His depiction of human sentiments, feelings and emotions
in a direct way without any sophistication are here in this poem. His stress on
the web of family life and the integration of the individual which remains the
prominent characteristic of his poetry.

The poem-Returning presents the pathos of the poet’s returning home

after several years to his home and calling out desperately for his mother who
has ceased to live for forty years but his memories are so strong in him that
he forgets the fact that now the home is not the same any more. His mother
has ceased to be there for fort years but his memories get tangled with the
present and he almost feels like the schoolboy of the once upon a time who
was coming home to have food served by his mother. The haunting memories
are giving a lot pain, sorrow and sadness to the poet in this poem.
The image of the ‘blazing afternoon’ when he came to home and to
search her mother in kitchen in backyard and everywhere ,tells us the strong
emotions towards his mother which have been lost for forty years. The poet’s
manner of looking for his mother creates a kind of pathos in the minds of a
reader. Finally he becomes desperate because he searched his mother under
the beds where he finds only old shoes and dust balls not his mother then he
comes out of the house crying Amma..Mother…here the poet gives us the
picture of motherless child who is crying for his lost mother for forty years.
Here the mother is symbolically presets the mother India. He is far away from
India for forty years.

The most of his poems have been written in America where has stayed
for forty years. Memory is real in the poem-Retuning,but the same memory is
a means of exploring of his self in this poem. Ramanujan has turned most of
his autobiographical elements into a vivid creative art. . While exploring many
facets of love in his poems he tries to establish his concept of man-woman
relationships.

A famous critic Bergson says, “Memory is there, which conveys

something of the past into the present”. It means the memory and Reality
stand in opposite direction like the past and the Present. whenever
Ramanujan talks of mother, even in his other poems, he means her and no
other ends. The loving image of his mother, who at times rises to a universal in the poem.

Family is a sustained symbol in his creative

consciousness in this poem.. Family and relations are two motifs like two
chips in Ramanujan’s artistical poetic kaleidoscope.
To conclude, through his memories, A.K.Ramanujan finally comes to his
mother or mother India and her culture. This is a kind of ‘returning’. ‘the home
coming’ of the poet who stand between the past –memories and the present-
reality. In the last stanza of the poem his helplessness which is created by his
past slowly disappears because the reality –the presentness which makes
him realize himself that he was sixty one now, not a child anymore. The
nostalgia of the poet is very strong here.the poem is symbolically presents the
poet’s attempts of The east-west encountering and attemps of the memories
and realities encountering and finally the returning for union with mother-
India or indianess.

KOFI AWOONOR

Kofi Awoonor was born George Awoonor-Williams in Wheta, Ghana, to Ewe parents. He was a poet, literary critic,
professor of comparative literature and served as an ambassador for Ghana. Awoonor earned a BA from
University College of Ghana, an MA from University College, London, and a PhD in comparative literature from
SUNY Stony Brook. He is the author of novels, plays, political essays, literary criticism, and several volumes of
poetry, including Rediscovery and Other Poems  (1964), Night of My Blood  (1971), Ride Me, Memory  (1973), The
House by the Sea  (1978), The Latin American and Caribbean Notebook (1992), and a volume of collected
poems, Until the Morning After  (1987).

Awoonor’s grandmother was an Ewe dirge singer, and the form of his early poetry draws from the Ewe oral
tradition. He translated Ewe poetry in his critical study Guardians of the Sacred Word and Ewe Poetry  (1974).
Other works of literary criticism include The Breast of the Earth: A Survey of the History, Culture, and Literature of
Africa South of the Sahara (1975).

In the early 1970s, Awoonor served as chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature at SUNY Stony
Book. He returned to Ghana in 1975 to teach at University College of Cape Coast. In Ghana, he was arrested and
tried for suspected involvement in a coup. He was imprisoned without trial and was later released; he wrote
about his time in jail in The House by the Sea. Awoonor resumed teaching after his sentence was remitted. In the
1980s, he was the Ghanaian ambassador to Brazil and Cuba and served as ambassador to the United Nations
from 1990 to 1994; in 1990 he published Ghana: A Political History from Pre-European to Modern Times.

Awoonor is author of the novels This Earth, My Brother… (1971) and Comes the Voyager at Last: A Tale of Return
to Africa  (1992). He died in the Westgate shopping mall attack in Kenya in September 2013.

THE WEAVER BIRD BY KOFI AWOONOR

The weaver bird built in our house

And laid its eggs on our only tree.
We did not want to send it away.
We watched the building of the nest
And supervised the egg-laying.
And the weaver returned in the guise of the owner.
Preaching salvation to us that owned the house.
They say it came from the west
Where the storms at sea had felled the gulls
And the fishers dried their nets by lantern light.
Its sermon is the divination of ourselves
And our new horizon limits at its nest.
But we cannot join the prayers and answers of the communicants.
We look for new homes every day,
For new altars we strive to rebuild
The old shrines defiled by the weaver's excrement.

Introduction

Kofi Awonoor, a late Ghanaian poet, wrote a post-colonial poem titled “The Weaver Bird.” It uses the weaver bird
as a symbol to signify the arrival of colonists in Africa. A deeper meaning is effectively communicated despite
the language’s simplicity. It portrays the colonizer’s invasion as well as the plight of the colonized people.The
colonizer established itself on the African continent, leaving them with little, as evidenced by phrases like “And
lay its eggs on our only tree” and “ancient temples soiled by the weaver’s dung.” The phrase “excrement” conveys
a tone of bitterness and resentment, demonstrating how Africans do not value the Western ways that are being
imposed upon them as superior.

About the Poet

To portray Africa during independence, Ghanaian poet and author Kofi Awoonor mixed the lyrical traditions of his
own Ewe people with modern and religious symbolism. In addition to publishing under the name Kofi Nyidevu
Awoonor, he began writing under the pen name George Awoonor-Williams.The University of Ghana was where he
taught African literature. While attending the Storymoja Hay Festival in Nairobi, Kenya, in September 2013,
Professor Awoonor was among those slain in the attack at the Westgate shopping mall.

Stanza 1

The weaver bird built in our house

And laid its eggs on our only tree.

We did not want to send it away.

We watched the building of the nest

And supervised the egg-laying.

The poet opens the poem by telling us that the weaver bird builds its nest on the speaker’s tree. We can
understand that the weaver bird symbolizes the Europeans while the speaker’s only tree represents the African
continent. The first few lines give us an idea about the unexpected arrival of the Europeans to the African
continent.The poem reveals the ignorance of the African people and how hospitable they were to the weaver bird
when it first visited them. Africans went as far as risking their only home to accommodate the weaver bird who
felt so comfortable building this nest.They equally supervise the egg-laying process which means that Africans
too still watch the establishment of the European establishment without protesting as they did this to only show
their hospitality to the weaver bird.

Stanza 2

And the weaver returned in the guise of the owner.

Preaching salvation to us that owned the house.

They say it came from the west

Where the storms at sea had felled the gulls

And the fishers dried their nets by lantern light.

Its sermon is the divination of ourselves

And our new horizon limits at its nest.

After the weaver bird felt comfortable, he started claiming ownership of the African lands. The first line of this
stanza reminds us of the period in which Europeans in their various explorations were in search of precious
resources. It highlights the fact that after these Europeans found what they were looking for on the African
continent. They retained the guise of the owner to pre-salvation to the African People.This means that the
Europeans use religion as a tool for the African mind to enslave them as people and take ownership of their lands
and resources. The poet then again emphasizes the weaver bird’s tricks in preaching the gospel, introducing the
doctrine of salvation to the African people, and also predicting the future of African lives by using messages from
its book.The last line of this stanza shows us the limits of the African’s new horizon, this means that the Africans
have experienced a new culture and their new experiences are only limited by the laws and practices put in place
by these Europeans. This stanza reveals the duality in the character of the Europeans who disguise themselves
as the preachers of the world only to reveal their ulterior motive as time by to colonize mother Africa.

Stanza 3

But we cannot join the prayers and answers of the communicants.

We look for new homes every day,

For new altars we strive to rebuild

The old shrines defiled by the weaver's excrement.

Here there is a total rejection of the Europeans will by the African people. The Africans in this stanza are
displaying a tone of anger and bitterness towards the ways of the Europeans as they are unable to relate well
with their messages of salvation and peace. They deem it hypocritical of the weaver bird to preach two different
messages at the same time.They cannot, therefore, join the prayers and answers of the communicants. Towards
the end of the poem, a speaker delves deeper into the dilemma of the current African who is faced with the
European religion as well as African traditional religion. The Africans whose one new home has been claimed by
the Europeans continue to search for new homes every day.The final lines of this poem emphasize how the
African traditional religion has suffered rejection in modern times because of the influence of the weaver bird.
The establishment of schools, churches, and other European institutions are seen to be factors behind the
development of the African shrines by the weaver.Even though the shrines of the Africans have been defiled by
the Europeans, they will not relent, they will continue to look for new homes every day and rebuild new altars. The
poet in this final line sends a message of hope to Africans. He claims that Africans still have opened their stage
for lost shrines and can’t strive to rebuild new altars.

SONGS OF SORROW BY KOFI AWOONOR

I.

Dzogbese Lisa has treated me thus

It has led me among the sharps of the forest
Returning is not possible
And going forward is a great difficulty
The affairs of this world are like the chameleon feces
Into which I have stepped
When I clean it cannot go.1

I am on the world's extreme corner,

I am not sitting in the row with the eminent
But those who are lucky
Sit in the middle and forget
I am on the world's extreme corner
I can only go beyond and forget.

My people, I have been somewhere

If I turn here, the rain beats me
If I turn there the sun burns me
The firewood of this world
Is for only those who can take heart
That is why not all can gather it.
The world is not good for anybody
But you are so happy with your fate;
Alas! The travelers are back
All covered with debt.

II.

Something has happened to me

The things so great that I cannot weep;
I have no sons to fire the gun when I die
And no daughters to wail when I close my mouth
I have wandered on the wilderness
The great wilderness men call life
The rain has beaten me,
And the sharp stumps cut as keen as knives
I shall go beyond and rest.
I have no kin and no brother,
Death has made war upon our house;

And Kpeti's great household is no more,

Only the broken fence stands;
And those who dared not look in his face
Have come out as men.
How well their pride is with them.
Let those gone before take note
They have treated their offspring badly.
What is the wailing for?
Somebody is dead. Agosu himself
Alas! A snake has bitten me
My right arm is broken,
And the tree on which I lean is fallen.

Agosi if you go tell them,

Tell Nyidevu, Kpeti, and Kove
That they have done us evil;
Tell them their house is falling
And the trees in the fence
Have been eaten by termites;
That the martels curse them.
Ask them why they idle there
While we suffer, and eat sand.
And the crow and the vulture
Hover always above our broken fences
And strangers walk over our portion.

“Song of Sorrow 1 and 2 is a pessimistic poem. It is a dirge in which the living blame the ancestors for the
hardship and difficulties that their departure has left behind. Much of this meaning is conveyed through several
important images used in the poem.

The desolation and helplessness that has occurred is presented right at the beginning of the Song of Sorrow 1 in
the form of “chameleon faeces”. The image is appropriate as it conjures up the picture of something that cannot
be wiped away or made clean. It is this catastrophe that is emphasized by the use of this image.

A series of other images closely associated with desolation, destruction and even death, is used in successive
parts of the poem: References can be made to the images like the “Sun and rain” that “burn” and beat
respectively; the sun that can no longer be fired because there are no sons; other plants and animal image such
as “the sharp stumps, the falling “tree” which also symbolizes the death of Agosu, an important family elder, the
“broken fence; the “snake” the “cow” and the “vultures” which are all destructive creatures. The “wilderness” is
not spared in reference to its desolation.

The overwhelming feeling in the poem is that nothing has gone right since the departure of the ancestors and
only suffering remains for survivors including the persona. Even those who travel and return have to confront a
miserable life. An entire civilization or way of life represented by “Kpeti’s great household” is no more. What are
left are the broken fences now taken over by entire strangers.”

EASTER DAWN BY KOFI AWOONOR

That man died in Jerusalem

And his death demands dawn marchers
From year to year to the sound of bells.
The hymns flow through the mornings
Heard on Calvary this dawn.
the gods ate crying, my father’s gods are crying
for a burial — for a final ritual —
but they that should build the fallen shrines
have joined the dawn marchers
singing their way towards Gethsemane
where the tear drops of agony still freshen the cactus
He has risen! Christ has risen!
the gods cried again from the hut in me
asking why that prostration has gone unheeded.
The marchers sang of the resurrection
That concerned the hillock of Calvary
Where the ground at the foot of the cross is level.
the gods cried, shedding
 clayey tears on the calico
the drink offering had dried up in the harmattan
the cola-nut is shrivelled
the yam feast has been eaten by mice
and the fetish priest is dressing for the Easter service.
The resurrection hymns come to me from afar
touching my insides.
Then the gods cried loudest
Challenging the hymners.
They seized their gongs and drums
And marched behind the dawn marchers
Seeking their Calvary
Seeking their tombstones
And those who refused to replace them
In the appropriate season.

SONG OF WAR BY KOFI AWOONOR

I shall sleep in white calico;

War has come upon the sons of men
And I shall sleep in calico;
Let the boys go forward,
Kpli and his people should go forward;
Let the white man’s guns boom,
We are marching forward;
We all shall sleep in calico.

When we start, the ground shall shake;

The war is within our very huts;
Cowards should fall back
And live at home with the women;
They who go near our wives
While we are away in battle
Shall lose their calabashes when we come.

Where has it been heard before

That a snake has bitten a child
In front of its own mother;
The war is upon us
It is within our very huts
And the sons of men shall fight it
Let the white man’s guns boom
And its smoke cover us
We are fighting them to die.

We shall die on the battlefield

We shall like death at no other place,
Our guns shall die with us
And our sharp knives shall perish with us
We shall die on the battlefield.

LEOPOLD SEDAR SENGHOR

Senegalese poet, writer, and statesman Léopold Sédar Senghor was born near Dakar in the town of Joal to a
Fulbe mother and a Serer trader father. He was educated at the École Nationale de la France d’Outre-Mer in Paris,
where he became friends with Aimé Césaire and future French president George Pompidou. After earning his
French citizenship, Senghor taught in Tours and Paris. He joined the French army during World War II and spent
18 months in a German prison camp. After serving successive terms representing Senegal in the French National
Assembly, Senghor returned to his native land, where he led his nation’s independence movement in 1960. He
eventually became Senegal’s first democratically elected president, a post which he held for the next twenty
years.

Senghor’s political and literary careers were inextricably linked. Residing part-time in France, he wrote poems of
resistance in French which engaged his Catholic spirituality even as they celebrated his Senegalese heritage.
Senghor is the author of several collections of poetry, including Chants d’ombre (1945), Nocturnes (1961), and
The Collected Poetry (1991, translated by Melvin Dixon). He also edited an anthology of work by African poets in
French colonies, Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poésie Négre et Malagache (1945, with an introduction by Jean-Paul
Sartre). His nonfiction work includes numerous volumes on politics, philosophy, sociology, and linguistics.

Senghor co-founded, with Aimé Césaire, the Négritude movement, which promotes distinctly African cultural
values and aesthetics, in opposition to the influence of French colonialism and European exploitation. He also co-
founded the journal Presence Africaine with Alione Diop. Senghor, the first African invited to join the Académie
Française, was awarded honorary doctorates from 37 universities, in addition to many other literary honors.
Senghor died at his home in France at the age of 95.

IN MEMORIAM BY LEOPOLD SEDAR SENGHOR

translated, from the French, by Zack Rogow

It’s Sunday.
I’m afraid of the crowd that looks like me with its stone faces.
From my glass tower crowded with migraines and impatient Ancestors
I muse over the rooftops and hills in the mist
In the calm—the chimneys are serious and naked.
At their feet my dead are sleeping; all my dreams deeds—dust
All my dreams, needless blood spilled down the streets, mixing with the blood of butcher shops.
And now, from this observation post, as if from the outskirts of the city
I muse over my dreams walking distractedly down the streets, sleeping at the foot of the hills,
Like the drovers of my race on the banks of the Gambia and the Saloum
And now the Seine, at the foot of the hills.
Let me think about my dead!
Yesterday was All Saints, the Sun’s solemn birthday
And all the cemeteries were empty of memories.
Oh my Dead, who always refused to die, who were able to keep Death at bay
Away from the Sine, away from the Seine, and in my fragile veins, my indomitable blood
Protect my dreams as you protected your migratory sons with their skinny legs.
Oh my dead! defend the Paris rooftops in the Sunday fog
The rooftops that protect my dead.
Let me leave my dangerously safe tower and walk down to the street
With my brothers who have blue eyes
And rough hands.

NIGHT OF SINE BY LEOPOLD SEDAR SENGHOR

Woman, put on my forehead your balsam hands,

your hands softer than fur.
Up there, the tall palm trees swinging in the night breeze rustle hardly.
Not even the nurse’s song.
Let the rhythmic silence rock us.
Let’s listen to its song, let’s listen to the beating of our dark blood, let’s listen
To the beating-of the dark pulse of Africa in the mist of lost villages.
Look how the tired moon sinks towards its bed of slack water.
Look how the burst of laughter doze off, and even the bards themselves
dandle their heads like children on the backs of their mother.
Look how the feet of the dancers grow heavy, as well as the tongue of the alternating chorus.

This is the hour of the stars and of the Night that dreams reclining on that range of clouds, draped in its long gown
of milk.
The roofs of the huts gleam gently. What are they so confidently telling to the stars?
Inside, the hearth extinguishes in the intimacy of bitter and sweet scents.

Woman, light the lamp of butterclear oil, let the Ancesters, like their parents, talk the children in bed.
Let’s listen to the voice of the Ancients of Elissa. Exiled as we are they did not want to die, their seminal flood is
lost in the sand.
Let me hear, in the smoky which I visit, a reflection of propitious souls
Let my head on your breast, warm as a dang taken from the fire and smoking.
Let me inhale the smell of our Dead, let me collect and repeat their living voice, let me learn
To live before I sink, deeper than the diver, into the lofty depth of sleep.

Leopold Sedar Senghor was an African poet, who contributed much to the Negritude movement, started by the
French-speaking black intellectuals that looked at accepting the fact that one was black and that the fact came
with its own history, values and culture and sought to acquaint all people of African descent with freedom and
dignity.
In the poem, “Night in Sine”, Senghor looks at the subtleties of his culture and embodies them in the image of
womanhood, with soft hands, singing a song, not quite a lullaby. Throughout the poem, Senghor emphasizes on
the darkness around, in blood, the night that caresses him, in the smoke-filled hut and in the great depths of
sleep, but he speaks of these in honor of what his heritage is, that what is dark may also be good. He reveals
affection for Africa in his articulation of the magnificence of Negritude.
Senghor uses repetition as a powerful force to drive his imagery home. He continually looks at how
important ‘listening’ is and how each one is cradled in a ‘rhythmic silence’ because that is how they have been
conditioned in their subjugation – to not fight back, to accept, to go on within the circle of life. But Senghor
sparks a ray of hope in his poetry by pointing to how though the attempts to crush their spirits have been many,
yet, the beats of Africa still run in their ‘dark blood’, pulsing though much seems lost. He uses vivid imagery to
entice the senses, right from the beginning of the poem to capture his audience and keep them engaged. The
poem is never just a string of words, but one that is built to make you feel like you’re there within the experience
of the speaker. The weary moon and its slack seabed, reinforce the pattern of behavior and its familiarity. The
speaker talks of how even the storyteller, generally one to be found most enthusiastic or teeming with life,
quietens with the mother’s touch.
He paints a magnificent picture of the roofs having conversations with the stars as they reflect light
tenderly, pointing to the Negritude of his culture and how all can take pride in it. The speaker wishes to go back to
the voices of the ancestors, heeding their wisdom and not wanting their lineage to fall short of glory. It becomes
a give and take relationship between what is now and what had been before, where the former chooses to
become the sustenance for the latter, and the latter becomes the basis on which what is may build and claim
value in.
Throughout this piece, we see a celebration of African culture and ancestry, and an anger towards all that
colonized its beauty. A violence towards the violation and exploitation, a metaphorical death of Africanness. He
ends the piece with the speaker asking to be allowed to learn to live, to discover what it truly is before it was
contaminated.

GRACE NICHOLS

Grace Nichols is a poet whose work has been central to our understanding of the important cultural Caribbean-
British connection for nearly 3 decades. From her first collection, I Is a Long Memoried Woman (1983), to her
more recent work such as Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009), she has uncovered with a disquieting lyricism
and humour the various facets of life as a woman and as an immigrant living in the UK.
Nichols was born in Guyana in 1950, and moved to live in the UK in 1977. Her work is influenced by the history
and culture of her homeland, in particular the oral story-telling tradition with its fantastic folk tales, the landscape
and its rural tasks and the history of enslavement (particularly relating to women). ‘To My Coral Bones’ from
Startling the Flying Fish (2006) explores the importance of Nichols’ Caribbean heritage, suggesting she has
‘alwayscarried deepthese islands’.

On arrival in the UK, Nichols’ work began to respond to the contemporary situation. She was one of a number of
West-Indian poets, including Linton Kwesi-Johnson and John Agard, whose work also touched on racial tensions
at a time when immigration was at the centre of the political debates under Margaret Thatcher’s government.
Poems from her 1984 collection The Fat Black Woman’s Poems are an arresting and humourous riposte,
presenting the unfettered thoughts of the heroine in the bath or at the shops. A later poem, ‘Hurricane Hits
England’, expresses the connection between cultures, when a hurricane reminds her that ‘the earth is the earth is
the earth’.

Her poetry is characterized not just by the themes above, but by an acute attention to the language which carries
the poems. Her work marries the Creole of her homeland with standard English, creating new possibilities for
rhythm and rhyme. As such, while reading her poetry on the page offers fascinating insights to the potential for
linguistic hybridity, it is when spoken aloud that her techniques sing most powerfully.

In her reading for the Archive, Nichols’ voice brings the poems to life, giving free reign to the infectious lyrical
sweep of her verse. For example, in ‘Praise Song for My Mother’ (which is on the current GCSE syllabus), there is
a true harmony in the blend of the vibrant imagery, ‘the fish’s red gill’ and ‘the flame tree’s spread’, the haunting
recollection of the past tense ‘You were’, and the forward movement of the repeated stanza structure and end-
rhymes.

Her poetry for children is characterized by the same rhythms as her other poetry, although the subjects are
designed to appeal to a younger audience. ‘Cat-Rap’, included here, proves that Nichols herself is ‘The meanest
cat-rapper you’ll ever see Number one of the street-sound galaxy’.

IN MY NAME BY GRACE NICHOLS

Heavy with child

belly
an arc
of black moon
I squat over
dry plantain leaves
and command the earth
to receive you
in my name
in my blood
to receive you
my curled bean
my tainted
perfect child
my bastard fruit
my seedling
my sea grape
my strange mullato
my little bloodling
Let the snake slipping in deep grass
be dumb before you
Let the centipede writhe and shrivel
in its tracks
Let the evil one strangle on his own tongue
even as he sets his eyes upon you
For with my blood
I have cleansed you
and with my tears
I’ve pooled the river Niger
now my sweet one it is for you to swim

This compelling piece written by Grace Nichols deals with a variety of different themes such as freedom and
motherhood. This blog post will explore these two themes to the poem. To begin with, an exploration of what the
poem is about will be made. Then, the poetic devises will be analysed along with the poetic structure and the
message of the poem.

What is this poem about?

This poem is about a slave woman who gave birth to a child. A ‘mullato’ which is a term referring to children with
white and black ancestry. We can infer that this child is a ‘bastard’ which illustrates how the child was not born to
the woman’s husband but perhaps to a slave master. To further support this interpretation, we can deduce that
the child may be born on a plantation field or in a similar surrounding where there are ‘dry plantain leaves’ for the
mother to squat over and give birth.

Despite the harsh conditions in which the child is born, we can infer a mother’s prayer for the child’s safety. She
prays the following:

Let the snake slipping in deep grass

be dumb before you
Let the centipede writhe and shrivel
in its tracks
Let the evil one strangle on his own tongue
even as he sets his eyes upon you

This is a prayer because of the use of the word ‘let’ which helps her forbid the conditions that her child may go
through. These phrases can be taken as literal events which the child could go through or a figurative speech of
the harms and dangers in the world in which a mother doesn’t want their child to go through. The use of the
repetition helps emphasise the mother’s awareness of the cruelty of the world.

Structure

This poem is written as a free verse which means that it doesn’t follow a particular rhyming pattern or stanza
structure. This poem is written as a free verse to illustrate that the woman is free to be herself with her child. This
is the only moment in which she experiences freedom. Alternatively, it could be seen as an irony in her situation
where she may never experience freedom and the poem is her freedom.

Poetic Devices

Repetition: The use of repetition such as ‘my bastard fruit/my seedling/my sea grape/my strange mullato/ my
little bloodling’ helps illustrate the negative, neutral and endearing feeling all simultaneously in which the mother
feels about the child. We are aware of the conditions in which the child is born, therefore, this repetition
materialises all her feeling in one short stanza.

Alliteration: In the beginning of the poem the use of alliteration in the line ‘belly…an arc
of black moon’. This alliteration helps consolidate the beautiful imagery of pregnancy and the ‘b’ sound helps
illustrate how brave the woman is.

Message

This poem helps illustrate that a mother’s nurture, guidance and prayer can take you to a certain point. At that
point, there will be a moment in time where it is ‘for you to swim’ even if your mothers efforts, hardships and
guidance has ‘pooled’ the ‘tears’.
OF COURSE WHEN THEY ASK
FOR POEMS ABOUT THE 'REALITIES'
OF BLACK WOMEN BY GRACE NICHOLS

What they really want

at times
is a specimen
whose heart is in the dust

A mother-of-sufferer
trampled, oppressed
they want a little black blood
undressed
and validation
for the abused stereotype
already in their heads

Or else they want

a perfect song

I can say I can write

no poem big enough
to hold the essence
of a black woman
or a white woman
or a green woman
And there are black women
and black women
like a contrasting sky
of rainbow spectrum

Touch a black woman

you mistake for a rock
and feel her melting
down to fudge

Cradle a soft black woman

and burn fingers as you trace
revolution

And yes we cut bush

to clear paths
for our children
and yes,
we throw sprat
to catch whale
and yes,
if need be we'll trade
a piece-a-pussy
than see the pickney dem
in de grip-a-hungry-belly

Still, there ain't no

easy-belly category
of a black woman
or a white woman
or a green woman
And there are black women
strong and eloquent
and focused

And there are black women

who somehow always manage to end up
frail victim

And there are black women

considered so dangerous
in South Africa
they prison them away

Maybe this poem is to say,

that I like to see
we black women
full-of-we-selves walking

Cruching out
with each dancing step
the twisted self-negating
history
we've inherited
Crushing out
with each dancing step

PRAISE SONG FOR MY MOTHER BY GRACE NICHOLS

You were
water to me
deep and bold and fathoming

You were
moon's eye to me
pull and grained and mantling

You were
sunrise to me
rise and warm and streaming

You were
the fishes red gill to me
the flame tree's spread to me
the crab's leg the fried plantain smell
replenishing replenishing

Go to your wide futures, you said

Analysis of Praise Song for My Mother Stanza by Stanza

Praise Song For My Mother is a free verse poem of 5 stanzas, 3 tercets, a pentain (5 lines) and the final single line
stanza.

The lack of punctuation reflects the loose form of the original praise songs - sung or chanted or spoken - and
reinforces the idea of a free flowing yet rhythmically creative work.
Stanza 1

Mother is water, a metaphor for purity of love, deep and peaceful and understanding. The element water also
heals and cleanses and is essential for life. Note the structure of this stanza, repeated throughout the poem. The
first line is a simple two syllables...You were...the speaker looking back and celebrating the mother. As the poem
progresses the lines become relatively complex, a step by step kind of form developing, reflecting the
relationship between the two.

Stanza 2

The mother is the moon, again a metaphorical device, which is a symbol of all things feminine, emotion,
spirituality. This is the eye of a goddess, a calming influence over blood and tides. Mantling is an unusual word
which means covering, protecting.

Stanza 3

In contrast mother is also the sun rising each day, a symbol of renewed energy, warmth, growth and all round well
being. And of course without the sun there'd be no light.

Stanza 4

The longest stanza with 5 lines is full of images of nature - so mother is all things natural, specifically red gills
which allow the fish to breathe. She is the flame tree, a gorgeous red tree that fills the day with passion. The
crab's leg and fried plantain are foods, crab meat tastiest from the leg plantain wholesome when fried. So mother
is provider, nourisher, refilling life, renewing energy.

Stanza 5

A single line which shoots off at a tangent to the rest. Here is mother actually speaking, telling the speaker (and
the rest of the young family) to spread their wings and leave the home to experience their own lives. They have to
live their own life, away from mother. This is the conclusion drawn following all of the metaphorical stanzas -
love, spirituality, energy and nourishment mean nothing if the young ones cannot take what they have gained
from the mother out into the big wide world.

JAMES REANEY

James Crerar Reaney, OC FRSC (September 1, 1926 – June 11, 2008) was a Canadian poet, playwright, librettist,
and professor, "whose works transform small-town Ontario life into the realm of dream and symbol. "Reaney won
Canada's highest literary award, the Governor General's Award, three times and received the Governor General's
Award for Poetry or Drama for both his poetry and his drama.

Reaney was born on a farm in Easthope near Stratford, Ontario to James Nesbitt Reaney and Elizabeth Henrietta
Crerar. Almost all of Reaney's poems, stories, and plays are articulations of where he grew up. At a young age he
was interested in theatre, and created a puppet show for children while in his early teens.

Reaney's complex symbolic and poetic regional drama defies categorizing. Reaney's plays are a combination of
symbol, metaphor, chant, poetic incantation, choral speaking, improvisation, miming, and child play. Reaney
depends on the concept that we, the audience, are all "children of an older growth" and his audience have
responded to this expectation. The symbolic quest as the children search for truth and end in reconciliation with
the adult world are the basis of Reaney's plays. Critics have called him a colonial, a rationalist and
internationalist, a rabid nationalist, a symbolist, and a poet with the myth of coherence who is yet able to say
something in an age of the random.

Of his poetry, The Canadian Encyclopedia says: "Reaney's poetry, collected in Poems (1972), has earned him a
reputation as an erudite poet at once deriving structures from metaphor, mythology, and a cosmopolitan literary
tradition while deeply rooted in a regional sense of place."
Reaney's fiction of the 1940s and 1950s (collected in the 1994 book The Box Social and Other Stories, was
"influential in establishing the style of writing that has since become known as ‘Southern Ontario Gothic’.
Margaret Atwood has remarked that ‘without "The Bully", my fiction would have followed other paths'.... Playing
sophisticated games by switching voice, he achieves a kind of ‘magic realism’, often through the distorted
perspective and sense of disproportion of his child narrators."

MAPS
BY JAMES REANEY (1926-2008)

Five miles up from Pork Street

The maps hang on the wall
Gray-green windows on the world
Before which the scholars stand
And hear the gasp and roll Atlantic
Above, like the cynosure of a Queen Anne's Lace Dance
The dark red island, Britain
Proud and proud.

O there are maps of Asia

Where warm winds blow
When outside the Janus-frost
Rules the bread-white snow.
A sultry coil of breeze,
And a blossom,
Clogged winds of
Cinnamon and amber.

Fat yellow China

and purple India,
Ceylon like a chocolate comfit
The rim and dim ghost of Europe
Where the colour has run out . . .

Whenever we sing
'In days of yore'
We think of the New World's crown.
The green Northwest with its quaint inlets.
The brown Yukon.
Ungava Bay and Newfoundland
Pink fevered Saskatchewan
and purple Alberta.

GEORGE BOWERING

Born in Penticton, British Columbia, Canadian poet, novelist, and editor George Bowering earned a BA and an MA
at the University of British Columbia and completed graduate coursework at the University of Western Ontario. He
served as an aerial photographer for the Royal Canadian Air Force from 1954 to 1957. Bowering’s unadorned lyric
poems often engage the matter of daily and literary life. In a 2007 interview with Rachel Loden for Jacket
Magazine, Bowering discussed how his approach to writing shifts based on the form he is working in, stating,
“The different forms offer somewhat different good feelings. I like the dance of syllables when poetry is the thing.
I squirm in my chair. I like the daily advance of the story or novel or essay. Writing an essay is a lot like writing a
story. The sentence is what you want, the sentence that is very clear but mysterious at the same time.” On
shortlisting Changing on the Fly for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize, the judge’s citation notes, “In George Bowering’s
flight changes, lyric takes to the air – with spareness, resiliency and irrepressible humour. … Bowering is the poet
of delight in earthly matters, of bemusement at the self. His lyrics turn out the streetlights (who needs them!) and
light up the stars. And his lines try to understand what it is to exist, in the face of fears we all have, ‘fears that I
may cease to be.’”

Bowering has published more than 80 books. His poetry collections include Urban Snow (1991), George Bowering
Selected: Poems 1961–1992 (1993), Blonds on Bikes (1997), Changing on the Fly: The Best Lyric Poems of
George Bowering (2004), and Teeth (2013). Bowering has also published poetry under the pen name Ellen Field.
He is the author of the short story collection The Rain Barrel (1994) and collaborated with Ryan Knighton on the
short story collection Cars (2002) and with Angela Bowering, David Bromige, and Michael Matthews on the novel
Piccolo Mondo (1998). Bowering edited the short story anthologies Likely Stories: A Post-Modern Sampler (1992,
coedited with Linda Hutcheon) and And Other Stories (2001). His novels include Burning Water (1980) and
Caprice (1987); his historical nonfiction includes Bowering’s B.C.: A Swashbuckling History (1996) and Egotists
and Autocrats: The Prime Ministers of Canada (1999). Bowering’s writing has been translated into Spanish,
Italian, French, German, Chinese, and Romanian.

A founding editor of the avant-garde poetry journal TISH, Bowering also edited the Imago and has served as a
contributing editor for Open Letter. Canada’s first parliamentary poet laureate, Bowering has received the
Governor General’s Literary Award in both Poetry and Fiction, the Canadian Authors Association Award for
Poetry, and the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. He is an officer of the Order of Canada and of the Order of
British Columbia. Selections of his papers are held at the Queen’s University archives, the University of British
Columbia library, and the University of Calgary. Bowering has taught at the University of Calgary, the University of
Western Ontario, and Simon Fraser University. He lives in Vancouver, BC.