Samarkand and other markets I have known / Wole Soyinka.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Soyinka, Wole

Language:

English

Physical Description:

80 pages ; 20 cm

Place of Publication:

London : Methuen, 2002.

Summary:

Soyinka's title poem for this collection takes as its cue the Yoruba song 'The world is a market place'. By turns satirical and lyrical, this fourth collection of poetry, his first in ten years, spans the poet's recent experience of exile from Nigeria as well as the journeys that have followed his Nobel Prize for Literature award. Here are reflections on the deaths of politicians, dictators and dissident friends as well as invocations to fellow writers Ken Saro-Wiwa, Josef Brodsky and Chinua Achebe. In sections tellingly entitled 'Outsiders', 'Of Exits' or the poem sequence 'Twelve Canticles for the Zealot', Soyinka confronts political realities -- religious fundamentalism, bigotry and the repression of free speech. Others such as 'Lost Poems', 'Doctored Vision' or 'Visiting Trees (Night Hunt)' are evidence of a more private, interior search.

Contents:

Outsiders

Ah, Demosthenes! 3

Pens for Hire 5

Hours Lost, Hours Stolen 7

Business Lunch

The Bag Lady 10

Doctored Vision 14

Of Exits

Some Deaths are Worlds Apart 19

Exit Leet, Monster, Victim in Pursuit (Death of a Tyrant) 21

Where the News Came to me of the Death of a Tyrant 23

Exit 25

Calling Josef Brodsky for Ken Saro-Wiwa 26

Fugitive Phases

Lost Poems 33

In the Small Hours 35

Visiting Trees (Night Hunt) 36

The Sign of the Zealot

Twelve Canticles for the Zealot ... 43

Samarkand, and Other Markets I Have Known 49

Elegies

The Children of This Land 63

Tower Clock: Ake Revisited 65

Low-Cost Housing 67

Elegy for a Nation 68

Vain Ransom 78.

ISBN:

0413772551

OCLC:

50271816