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Spirit Brides

Togara Muzanenhamo

Cover Picture of The Spirit Brides
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Categories: 21st Century, African, First Collections
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (64 pages)
(Pub. Jul 2006)
9781857548525
£9.95 £8.96
Digital access available through Exact Editions
  • Description
  • Excerpt
  • Author
  • Contents
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • 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

    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)
    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

    '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.
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