and if anybody talks to you of wonders
if anyone says
‘there is nothing more beautiful in the world than the procession of the Ark at Axum!’

if anyone boasts the knuckliest punch in the village  
or a blinding skill with numbers
you can answer
‘well, what about the scabs on Tamrat’s knee?’

                from ‘What about the scabs on Tamrat’s knee?’

Chris 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.