Editorial: 15 September 2010

September 10, 2010 Seven poets from Bulawayo feature on the Zimbabwe domain: Clemence Chinyani, Lilian Dube, Thandeka Gonde, Shari Eppel, Deon Marcus, Mthabisi Phili and Mgcini Nyoni. With diverse professional experience alongside their poetry-writing, ranging from youth counselling to academia, psychology to accountancy, this group of young poets – the very youngest, Lilian Dube, is still at school – represents a slice of the vibrant poetry scene today in Zimbabwe’s second city. In his introductory essay, ‘Depleted Mines’, John Eppel describes Bulawayo as a place of “unnecessary suffering, unnecessary because Zimbabwe’s mineral wealth alone, if fairly distributed, would be sufficient to transform us into a sub-tropical Finland”. With its appalling water and sewerage systems, the memories of human-rights atrocities such as Gukurahundi, the massacre of thousands of Ndebele people by the Fifth Brigade in the 1980s, and Operation Murambatsvina, which displaced thousands of the city’s urban poor, it’s hard to imagine poetry written in Bulawayo not being political in some way. And indeed the selection of poems published here grapple with issues such as freedom of speech, violence, war and AIDS, some overtly and others more obliquely. Alongside the power of the heartfelt invectives and lament there is much to admire poetically, such as the honed imagery and taut form of Deon Marcus’s ‘Cubist’ and the sardonic description of drunkenness in Lilian Dube’s ‘Martha’s Tavern’. There’s a news item too from Zimbabwe, featuring a calligraphy artist’s reinterpretation of two poems previously featured on the PIW Zimbabwe domain.

For the United Kingdom issue, our partners at the Poetry Society have selected work by three poets who have been judges for poetry competitions organised by the society – the National Poetry Competition and the Foyle Young Poet of the Year Award. Jane Draycott makes recordings and sound-art for radio as well as writing for the page. Her poems published here include an extract from her reinterpretation of the medieval narrative poem Pearl, which earned her a 2008 Stephen Spender prize, and ‘Westernays’, a wonderfully imaginative and rhythmic exploration of a word found within the medieval Pearl manuscripts.

Daljit Nagra gained great acclaim for his first full collection, Look We Have Coming to Dover!, which is written in ‘Punglish’, a vibrant linguistic hybrid of the native Punjabi of his parents, standard English and Punjabi-influenced English. The selection of poems chosen for PIW demonstrate Nagra’s craft and sharp humour. ‘This Be the Pukka Verse’, its title tellingly evoking (amongst other texts) Philip Larkin’s poem which begins “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”, is a wry and rollicking list-poem portraying the India as seen by British colonials during the Raj period – a “jolly good land overflowing with silk and / spice and all the gems of the earth!”

Deryn Rees-Jones, well known in the UK for both her poetry and her criticism, completes the trio of British poets. Included in her selection is the striking poem ‘The Cemetery’, from her third collection Quiver, a book-length, narrative murder-mystery poem. Also referencing the work of an earlier poet, in ‘The Fish’ Rees-Jones takes the penultimate line – ‘rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!’ – of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem of the same name as the starting point for a piece that is exuberantly orgiastic and complex in its imagery.