Description

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One long poem and an eclectic mix of short poems from the Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian playwright, novelist, poet, and polemical essayist Wole Soyinka.

Wole Soyinka is one of Africa's outstanding writers. He is already well known in the United States as a playwright; two of his plays, The Trials of Brother Jero and Kongi's Harvest, were produced off-Broadway in New York. A number of his plays and a novel have been published but so far only a handful of his poems have appeared in anthologies and journals.

This collection consists of a long poem and a number of shorter ones. Idanre, the long one, was written especially for the Commonwealth (British) Arts Festival (1965) and is a creation myth of Ogun, the Yoruba God of Iron. The other poems range from a meditation on the news of the October Massacres in Northern Nigeria (1966) to a wry lament "To My First White Hairs" and the love poem "Psalm."

About the Author

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Wole Soyinka--playwright, novelist, poet and polemical essayist--was born in Nigeria in 1934. Educated there and at Leeds University, he worked in the British theatre before returning to West Africa in 1960. In 1986 he became the first African writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.