Arrivals in the mail from University of Nebraska Press. Tanella Boni is from Ivory Coast, and her poems are translated from French. The Sudanese poems (from thirty-one authors writing over a span of sixty years) are translated from Arabic. Both books are part of UNP's African Poetry Book Series, a worthy endeavor.
Boni uses some nice imagery:
the sea has lost the color of better days
forgotten the importance of a palette well-mixed
enough to bless the horizon sand to sky
and
as if the twelve labors of Hercules
once a point of fact
were just a bedtime story for people
after a hard day of hoping
"the color of better days" and "a hard day of hoping" are good.
The Sudanese poets, since the 1950s, seem to have been thinking a lot about identity, as Arab or not-Arab. There are war poems, an ancient tradition:
Dig no grave for me;
I shall lie in every inch of the earth.
I shall lie like water on the Nile's body;
like the sun over my homeland's fields.
The likes of me never take a grave for an abode.
They stood up,
and you stood up.
what makes the little tyrants think--and their faces grow pale--
that when the fighter dies so does the cause?
Political poetry, another ancient tradition:
With each coup in a dark abyss we plunge.
The heavy-footed junta besiege our songs.
They agitate our inkpot,
confiscate its internal peace.
They poison the cheerful spring
and place their muzzles on everything.
What a pleasant dream they disfigure,
in the eyes of each mother.
"they agitate our inkpot." That's a poet.