Selected Poems

About Selected Poems

 

This volume contains poems written between 1966 and 1989. A Shuttle in the Crypt, written while Soyinka was in prison, looks at a mind under solitary confinement.

 

Idanre, Soyinka's first published collection of poetry, follows the creation myth of Ogun, the Yoruba god of iron.

 

It was written for the Commonwealth Arts Festival (1965); the shorter poems range from a meditation on the new of the October Massacres in Northern Nigeria (1966) to a wry lament To My First White Hairs and the love poem Psalm. Mandela's Earth presents a selection of poems that are of searing urgency.

 

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.

 

Soyinka's career as a political activist in exile is inseparable from his writing which has earned him worldwide acclaim.

 

In 1986 he became the first African writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is currently Woodruff Professor of the Arts, Emory University, Atlanta.

 

 

 

 

The Author

Wole Soyinka

 

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.

 

Soyinka's career as a political activist in exile is inseparable from his writing which has earned him worldwide acclaim. Soyinka's numerous plays include The Road, The Lion and the Jewel, Death and the King's Horseman and many others. His earlier prose work The Interpreters was awarded the Jock Campbell Prize for Commonwealth Literature. His collections of poetry include Idanre and Other Poems (1967) and A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972) were composed during a period of over two years in prison without trial, most of it in solitary confinement. He has also written two earlier autobiographical volumes, Ake: The Years of Childhood and Isara: A Voyage Around Essay, published in 1981 and 1990 respectively. In 1988 his collection of essays on literature and culture Art, Dialogue and Outrage was published.

 

He received a New Statesman John Whiting Award for 1966-7 and was Overseas Fellow at Churchill College Cambridge in 1973-4 where he wrote Death and the King's Horseman. He has been awarded the George Benson Medal for the Royal Society of Literature and the Unesco medal for the Arts. In 1986 he became the first African writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is currently Woodruff Professor of the Arts, Emory University, Atlanta.

 

Reviews

'The poems on Mandela comment on one another, deepening our response to the nature of political immolation. Mandela's Earth is an invaluable interlinkage of poems, words for a new age.' 

Ben Okri, The Guardian

'His images run into each other like brilliantly coloured dyes...He has a commanding theme, the need to be 'earthed': electricity to land, industry to civilization, aggression to labour, man to woman...His sense of joy and freedom is irrepressible.'

Richard Holmes, The Times