|
|
 |
 |
 |
| |
| Freedom is Only a Thought Away |
|
|
|
|
| Category: |
Poetry |
| Author: |
Stewart Wellington Kunaka |
| Publisher: |
Eland Roars Publishing |
| Price: |
£6.99 |
| ISBN: |
9780955631306 |
| Pages: |
68 |
| Reviewed in issue: |
9 |
|
The first thing you notice about this book is the awful cover – I don’t mean the design so much as the horrible feel of the paper, which manages to be sort of squeaky and unnaturally shiny in a ‘nails down the blackboard’ sort of way. It’s a real feat actually to hold the book open and get inside to read the poems (I recommend wearing gloves), which is a shame, because the poems themselves are certainly worth a read.
The voice emerging from the page is distinctly modern and complex, involved in a struggle to wrench meaning from old paradigms (religious or cultural imperialism, contemporary mediated numbness, patriarchal distortions and debased language itself), to slip between over-trodden ways that lead nowhere and somehow to screw up the courage to face oneself.
The poetry is masculine, direct, often fluent, sometimes polemic, moistened by humour, sometimes mired in rhetorical questioning, but always seeking after a truth of form or content, never flat or arid. The poet’s Zimbabwean heritage and English present gnash at one another, or stare inwards with a thousand mistrusts, and this brings an energy to the work, as well as a linguistic range, a palette of exotic imagery, a web of psychological penetration and a fuel arising out of the sundered sense of self (one could say the pre-eminent twenty-first century condition, poetically at least).
So, in all, a worthwhile venture – ‘Fighting for God’, ‘Mother Tongue’ and ‘Bloody Cupid! Careless with his arrows’ deserve special mention. |
|
|
|
| Go
Back |
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
