Songs my Country Taught
me
by John Eppel
*Prize winner at the 2006 Zimbabwe Book Publishers' Literary Awards
The
poems in this collection range from the well-crafter juvenilia of Eppel’s
late teenage years to the more mature poems of his late fifties. These
years span a turbulent period in Zimbabwe’s history from settler
oppression to civil war to Independence to neo-colonial domination.
The poems record with rare honesty the contradictions of being indigenous
and white, contradictions which are transformed by the best poems into
paradoxes, or what James Joyce called ‘epiphanies’, ‘when
the soul of the commonest subject seems to us radiant’. In his prose
writings Eppel’s voice is predominantly satirical, often viciously
so; but in this collection of eight poems, the voice is more sociable
disposed. There are times, indeed, when he is painfully confessional;
times when he is outraged at man’s inhumanity to man; times when
he revisits the satirical world of his novels; but on the whole, the poems
are convivial, the sort that after you have read one you may feel inclined
to retort: ‘I could have said that!’
‘… his poems have nothing to do with white nostalgia for the
colonial period. On the contrary, they circle round in an attempt both
to embrace a past (after all, he has no sense of identity) and also to
wean himself from it.’ – Stephen Watson, Weekly
Mail and Guardian.
‘Eppel is a poet with a compulsive gift for the telling image …
he has clung to a southern African idiom and concerns, even though expert
in a “world language” – Geoffrey Haresnape, New
Contrast.
2005:
205 x 114; 134pp
ISBN 1 77922 038 3
Territory: World