Description
Book SynopsisChris Beckett grew up in 1960s Ethiopia, a country he describes as a 'barefoot empire, home of black-maned lions ...old priests decked out like butterflies and blazing young singers of Ethio-jazz'. "Ethiopia Boy" plunges the reader into praise poems that sing and boast and glory in the colours and textures of this extraordinary country. Here is a world of feasting on spicy kikwot and of famine sucking the water from rivers, of lion buses and a prayer child, where Earth sings greetings to the feet that walk on her. Haunted by the memory of his friend Abebe, the cook's son, Beckett celebrates and laments a lost boyhood in poems of vivid immediacy. Cover painting: "Isao Miura", "Crossing the Water" (oil on canvas). Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.
Trade Review'There is a drive to these poems, a quality of song, a fresh simplicity that neatly sidesteps sentimentality though replete with longing, a feel for the past.' --Fred D'Aguiar 'Chris Beckett's poetry is highly original in the way it works with two sharply distinctive traditions in a uniquely engaging style. The language is always fresh and surprising and the sentiments are always heartfelt but in a subtly complex way that raises serious political questions.' --Daljit Nagra
