The late hour trickles to morning. The cattle low profusely by the anthill where brother and I climb and call Land's End. We are watchmen overlooking a sea of hazel-acacia-green, over torrents of dust whipping about in whirlwinds and dirt tracks that reach us as firths.

from 'Captain of the Lighthouse'

Togara Muzanenhamo's first collection of poems evokes a number of worlds, familiar and unfamiliar. He takes us from his vivid, vanished childhood in Zimbabwe to Europe, where he lived for some years, making as he goes the stories and connections that coax a meaning out of time and change. These are less poems of memory than of creation. There exists a fractured world, partly hidden from the poet, in which dream makes a different kind of order. This unpredictable, parallel world provides an undertone, a treacherous reflection. Spirit Brides combines the real and the surreal, stone and steel on the one hand, and air on the other. The plains of the veldt in Zimbabwe are as tangible as the bookstore in Antwerp or the bottle-shop in Paris. There is a language here that fills some of the troubling silences of our time, that engages death, violence and, most particularly, love.

Table of Contents

Captain of the Lighthouse

The Pale Saint

Nationalist Archives

Smoke

The Craft

Six Francs Seventy-five

The Pool

The Laughing Wood

Den Haag

Pine Thicket

Views without Buildings

Tea and Sandwiches

The Dawn Chorus

Roads

The Boy Who Ate Clouds for Tea

The Small Room

The Shape of a Thousand Things

Skaters

Late Night and the Road

Helpless Goodbyes

Excursion

The Armchair

The Ornithologist's Daughter

Leaves

Chemins Perdus

The Slide

Half Untold

Epworth

The Spirit Brides

Arguments Left

Pallbearer

Petals

Monday Men

The Conductor

Man in the Bowler Hat

Skin-box

The Red Room

Strangers

The Last Days of Winter

Lineage

Photographer

Tomorrow

Oxygen

Aubade

Gumiguru