Traveller’s Palm

Books - Poetry

travellers_palm

by Landeg White
Kondwani Publications 2017

A second edition, “Pruned and Re-invigorated”.

Traveller’s Palm is a celebration of the journey of Landeg White’s life, of the alliances formed and the battles fought and the “spots of time” that define them.

The week I landed, I couldn’t distinguish
face from face, tree from tree. I found
girls too ripe, the flowers over-doing it,
the sunsets vulgarly ostentatious,

and the night sky, in dazzling 3D
with its billion lamps, intimidated.
How could I read such over-statement
when irony withered on the tongue?

Beissel described priapic breadfruit,
hibiscus with their flies undone. Witty,
of course, but false. The trick
was never to adumbrate the exotic,

but to be re-born, writing as though
such miracles were entirely natural,
the scheme of things. As began to happen
when faces cracked into separate smiles.

from Traveller’s Palm by Landeg White

Reviews

“Seven chapters contain sixty-nine quartets of quatrains, in largely unrhymed pentameter, though the form forces ear and eye to notice half-rhymes and assonance, to give attention to a language which is being paid out measure by exact measure. This is dense, ambitious writing, a poetry of witness and strict fact”

Poetry Wales


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Translating Camões

Books - Translations

translating-camoes

by Landeg White
Universidade Católica

In the comprehensive and authoritative Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker, David Connolly, comments ‘translators … rarely keep notes about the process of translation or any record of the choices made in the process,’ adding ‘it is precisely insights into this process that are missing from most theoretical models.’

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The View From the Stockade

Books - Poetry

view_from_the_stockade

by Landeg White
DANGAROO Press 1991

Now out of print, this title shall soon be available as a PDF e-Book.

The View From the Stockade begins and ends with poets who are threatened with political violence for being poets. The stockades, in southern Africa or York, are places of safety where poetry like private life may flourish. But they are also places of sadness, or anguish over cruelty and injustice and of regret for vanished pastoral. This is an accomplished but embattled book with a strong sense of places and of divided peoples, in which poetry fights back with tenderness and lyricism, with celebrations of family love and the ramshackle heroism or ordinary people.

The truth is he was born at Chimwalira
not Bethlehem. For Immanuel the conception
was a good one. But it was hard in a place
without writing to show prophecies fulfilled.
She gave birth on a reed mat in a mud house,
but so did every woman. How much grander
a stable signifying property in the foreground.
So when the Magi appalled by the Nile’s
green wilderness turned back worshipping
a Jewish boy in a safe colony, they missed
their star’s conjunction with Crux Australis
and God lay forgotten in Africa.

Chimwalira,

“where someone died”. He grew up ordinarily,
neither Tarzan nor Shaka, eating millet
and wild mice. After his circumcision
there were songs about his dullness with women.
He became a blacksmith and a doctor skilled
in exorcism, and people saw he was touched.
But there was nothing startling to the elders
in his proverbs. He died old at thirty-three,
a normal life span.

(It was the Reverend Duff McDuff
screamed the Python priest was the Black Christ
as they led him to his steamer in their straightjacket.)

from The View From the Stockade by Landeg White


Reviews

“The View from the Stockade provides an advance on the already considerable achievement of White’s earlier collection For Captain Stedman. The wit, irony and strong sense of history are still there, but mellowed by a more compassionate perspective and domestic tenderness.”

London Magazine


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Studying to be Singular

Books - Caribbean Studies

studying_singular

by Landeg White

Studying to be Singular is a double biography. First of John Gabriel Stedman, 1744 – 1797, the idiosyncratic artist and soldier. Secondly of the book he wrote about his five years’ campaigning in Suriname – at once a travelogue, a history, a military record, a naturalist’s diary, an anthropological classic, and one of the great love stories of the late 18C, reflected in a series of plays, poems, novels, and pamphlets that constitute the book’s afterlife.

Within the book are dozens of illustrations, including the engravings by William Blake – based on Stedman’s sketchings of scenes from the Suriname planter-slave society, which were used by the abolitionist movement in their campaign against slavery. Also included are several original watercolours by John Gabriel Stedman, published for the first time.

Reviews

“Landeg White’s handsome and vivid account of Stedman, Studying to be Singular: John Gabriel Stedman, 1744-1797, itself delightfully illustrated, is a felt and eloquent tribute by one of our most versatile men of letters, poet, novelist, translator, connoisseur of empire, and warrior for justice.”

Claude Rawson


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South

Books - Poetry

south

by Landeg White
Cemar 1999

South, the setting of Landeg White’s fourth book of poems, is contested territory, its ‘dangerous currents’ home to a poet who ‘will always marvel at precisely where I am living’. The West Indies, Africa and Portugal have gone into its making, but there are no stockade walls here protecting ‘us’ from ‘them’. This is a book over-shadowed by violence, but trusting in the power of speech ‘to keep us human’, in poems driven by lyricism, humour and a strong historical awareness.

And here he’s again, the Father
of Winds. Our matted pines
heave like an ocean, the almond trees

fuss prettily, ancient olives
munch and fumble, blue gums
bunch their shadow-boxing fists,

while up on the skyline, royal palms
semaphore with their ostrich feathers
to clouds scudding like clippers

on the Azores run. The Atlantic’s
in every blast, and how
the swallows pinion it, cruising

under our block’s cliff, accelerating
in the domestic air, hitting
the corner, and

FLAWEWEWEWEWE they are puffballs, ounces
of cartilage, sheer as silk to spattering
on the tessellated pavements,

feathering at the last split-
second in a teetering
pole-vault, swooping, skimming

the perfected charcoal of their shadows.
I watch them
trying on wings. I watch them

readying for the dangerous currents south.

from South by Landeg White

Reviews

“The West Indies, Africa and Portugal have gone into making South, a book overshadowed by violence but trusting in the power of speech ‘to keep us human’ in poems driven by lyricism, humour and a strong historical awareness.”

Wasafiri


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