64 Pages
©2013
Publisher: Oxford Poets
Purchase includes: EPUB, MOBI & PDF

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Chris Beckett grew up in 1960s Ethiopia, a country he describes as a ‘barefoot empire, home of black-maned lions...old priests decked out like butterflies and blazing young singers of Ethio-jazz’. Ethiopia Boy plunges the reader into praise poems that sing and boast and glory in the colours and textures of this extraordinary country. Here is a world of feasting on spicy kikwot and of famine sucking the water from rivers, of lion buses and a prayer child, where Earth sings greetings to the feet that walk on her.

Haunted by the memory of his friend Abebe, the cook’s son, Beckett celebrates and laments a lost boyhood in poems of vivid immediacy.

"There is a drive to these poems, a quality of song, a fresh simplicity that neatly sidesteps sentimentality though replete with longing, a feel for the past." —Fred D'Aguiar, poet, Continental Shelf