Bladed farms

John Greening

It is perhaps unfair to assume that a poet brought up in Zimbabwe will write about that country's difficulties, but while turmoil continually threatens in the language of Spirit Brides (the mob in "The Armchair"; the bodies in "The Craft"; the mounds and burying and blood-colour of "Leaves"; the "guillotine changeover" in "The Slide"), this young writer's concerns are ostensibly more personal, more oblique. The real sense of upheaval comes from his first collection's many roads, trains, boats and planes, and from his own multicultural background.

Togara Muzanenhamo (born in Zambia, in 1975, to Zimbabwean parents) writes in English, but studied in France and the Netherlands -both of which, together with Belgium and England-provide identifiable settings for poems in Spirit Brides. Others (such as"Den Haag" or "The Dawn Chorus") wander into an Ishiguro-like dream zone, conjured occasionally through sonnet or sestina, more often in relaxed, loosely bundled stanzas, and frequently in prose. Curiously, the Orkney poet, and translator of Kafka, Edwin Muir, came to this reader's mind -not so much because Muir's poetry apparently ignored the momentous events he lived through in post-war Prague, but because there is a similar reaching for the facelessly allegorical ("The Craft"), the mysteriously heraldic ("The Spirit Brides"), the Kafkaesque ("The SmallRoom"), perhaps as a way of suppressing something more painful.

Zimbabwe

itself features in the opening poem,where Muzanenhamo remembers how an anthill became a make-believe lighthouse,called "Land's End", the pirate language not entirely convincing as he playfully shifts it into "Aye, methinks, me miss my brother". Such witty juggling with tones and dialects is not the poet's strong point: he can be "cool" but seldom "light". His best writing makes no reference to itself, does not allow itself to be damaged by overexuberant metaphor. He is a tactile poet, agently erotic poet in "The Laughing Wood", tenderly lyrical in "Pine Thicket" and "Roads". The most powerful explorationof Zimbabwean landscape, and the book's most sustained achievement, is the concluding sequence, the elegiac prose-poem, "Gumiguru"("October").

Muzanenhamo juxtaposes an account of his father's dying hours with memories of their farm,including a dramatic fire in the vast orange orchard: "It crept with the silence of light -then, with the speed of the wind came rushing through the night with the sound of bones snapping clean and joints popping". Togara Muzanenhamo's is undoubtedly an unusual voice, if an immature one as yet. Some of the apparently experimental poems in Spirit Brides weaken the overall effect (the "Nationalist Archives" prose sequence really slows things down) and distract from the genuine successes, which are mostly those concerned with personal memories, particularly of childhood (sliding on a frosty lawn on "the worn out soles of our school shoes", rushing to catch falling leaves) and of love: "Helpless Goodbyes", with its potent image of staring though his own palm print on a train window to "a field where a ruined / Church fosters a tree"; a charming sestina, "Six Francs Seventy-five", which casually avoids all that form's pitfalls; or the simple record of a day walking in the Calder Valley in "Tea and Sandwiches", whose culminating imagery makes one wonder whether Zimbabwe had been in the poet's mind all along:

                A flask of tea and sandwiches; all day the

                            walk; now I take cover

                In a bird hide where the heather claws the

                            wood. The swollen clouds

                In the distance, dark gatherings of fluid,

                            pressing their weight over

                The bladed farm; the black winds splitting

                            and spitting out this way.

Review of The Spirit Brides - John Greening, The Times Literary Supplement

Bladed farms

John Greening