Download Free The Penguin Book Of South African Verse Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Penguin Book Of South African Verse and write the review.

Gathers poems by writers from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Mozambique, Angola, Malawi, Namibia, and Zambia.
All by writers who spent their formative years in South Africa, this diverse range of short stories spans from the end of World War II when the National Party was on the upsurge, to the early 1990s when the legal framework of apartheid was abolished, the ANC was legalized and Mandela was released.
From the ancient Egyptian inventors of the love lyric to contemporary poets, Bending the Bow: An Anthology of African Love Poetry gathers together both written and sung love poetry from Africa. This anthology is a work of literary archaeology that lays bare a genre of African poetry that has been overshadowed by political poetry. Frank Chipasula has assembled a historically and geographically comprehensive wealth of African love poetry that spans more than three thousand years. By collecting a continent’s celebrations and explorations of the nature of love, he expands African literature into the sublime territory of the heart. Bending the Bow traces the development of African love poetry from antiquity to modernity while establishing a cross-millennial dialogue. The anonymously written love poems fromPharaonic Egypt that open the anthology both predate Biblical love poetry and reveal the longevity of written love poetry in Africa. The middle section is devoted to sung love poetry from all regions of the continent. These great works serve as the foundation for modern poetry and testify to love poetry’s omnipresence in Africa. The final section, showcasing forty-eight modern African poets, celebrates the genre’s continuing vitality. Among those represented are Muyaka bin Hajji and Shaaban Robert,two major Swahili poets; Gabriel Okara, the innovative though underrated Nigerian poet; Léopold Sédar Senghor, the first president of Senegal and a founder of the Negritude Movement in francophone African literature; Rashidah Ismaili from Benin; Flavien Ranaivo from Madagascar; and Gabeba Baderoon from South Africa. Ranging from the subtly suggestive to the openly erotic, this collection highlights love’s endurance in a world too often riven by contention. Bending the Bow bears testimony to poetry’s role as conciliator while opening up a new area of study for scholars and students.
Of the great epic poets in the Western tradition, Luis Vaz de Camões (c. 1524- 1580) remains perhaps the least known outside his native Portugal, and his influence on literature in English has not been fully recognized. In this major work of comparative scholarship, George Monteiro thus breaks new ground, focusing on English-language writers whose vision and expression have been sharpened by their varied responses to Camões. Introduced to English readers in 1655, Camões's work from the beginning appealed strongly to writers. The young Elizabeth Barrett's Camonean poems, for example, inspired Edgar Allan Poe to appropriate elements from Camões. Herman Melville's reading of Camões bore fruit in his career-long borrowings from the Portuguese poet. Longfellow, T.W. Higginson, and Emily Dickinson read and championed Camões. And Camões as epicist and love poet is an éminence grise in several of Elizabeth Bishop's strongest Brazilian poems. Southern African writers have interpreted and reinterpreted Adamastor, Camões's Spirit of the Cape, as both a symbol of a dangerous and mysterious Africa and an emblem of European imperialism. Recognizing the presence of Camões leads Monteiro to provocative rereadings of such texts as Dickinson's "Master" letters, Poe's "Raven," Melville's late poetry, and Bishop's Questions of Travel.