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Gumiguru

Togara Muzanenhamo

Cover of Gumiguru by Togara Muzanenhamo
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Categories: 21st Century, African
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (96 pages)
(Pub. Oct 2014)
9781847772572
£9.95 £8.96
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Jan 2014)
9781847774811
£9.95 £8.96
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  • Description
  • Author
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • Gumiguru is the tenth month of the Shona calendar – a month of dryness and heat before the first rains fall and rejuvenate the land. Togara Muzanenhamo’s second collection is a cycle of poems distilling the experiences of a decade into one calendar year, framed through the natural and agricultural landscapes of Zimbabwe. The book stands as both an elegy for the poet’s father and a hymn to the veldt, the farms and villages, and the men and women whose lives are interwoven with the land and the changing seasons.
    Togara Muzanenhamo was born to Zimbabwean parents in Lusaka, Zambia in 1975. He was brought up in Zimbabwe, and then went on to study in The Hague and Paris. He became a journalist in Harare and worked for a film script production company. His work has appeared in magazines in Europe, ... read more
    Awards won by Togara Muzanenhamo Winner, 2022 The African Poetry Book Fund's Luschei Prize for African Poetry (Virga) Commended, 2021 Poetry Book Society Autumn Recommendation (Virga) Runner-up, 2015 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry  (Gumiguru)
    'Togara Muzanenhamo's second collection, named for the hot and dry tenth month of the Shona calendar, is a harsh but heartfelt tribute to the people and landscapes of the author's native Zimbabwe [...] this poet has a rare gift and should be admired for the risks he takes, which have enabled him to write some unusual, moving and yet understated poems about conflict, love and work'
    Times Literary Supplement, 16.10.2015.
    Praise for Togara Muzanenhamo 'Follows various weathers and global histories, speaking through a staggering variety of experiences'

    Seán Hewitt, Irish Times Best Books of the Year 2021

     'Muzanenhamo wears his erudition and research with ease, finding the cracks of light in historical documents and prising them open... There is an energetic tightness to Muzanenhamo's verse that can be turned to both the disturbing and the musical. He is always conscious of the revelatory capacity of syntactical compactness, creating a poetry that is both rooted in the earth and invested in the possibility of metaphysics.'
    Sean Hewitt, The Irish Times

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