In 1994 the worst episode of genocide since the Holocaust of the Second World War ravaged the Central African country of Rwanda. Derick Burleson lived there and taught at the National University during the two years leading up to the genocide. The poems I
| |||||||||||||||
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Editorial Reviews
Review
"The place is Rwanda, the poet is a teacher of English from the American south, the poetry has the loveliness and wisdom of a casual, easy-breathing and humorous voice, able to encompass the clashes and the dovetailings of cultures. So you think at the start, and for a long while. The book then moves slowly from peace to the tides of civil war. Humane, frightening, horrifying, vivid, Burleson’s Ejo does what Conrad said all writing should do: it makes you see."—Alicia Ostriker
"Derick Burleson's wonderfully daring and unified collection of poems about Rwanda is so empathic, so bracing and forthright, so richly humane—at times comical, at times heartbreaking—that we come away from its testament radically deepened, shaken, enlivened, and changed."—Edward Hirsch
"Burleson is the poet in Rwanda the way Vallejo was the poet in Paris and Neruda the poet in Malaysia: in the running, up the country, on the scene. The lines are scrupulous, the movement scriptural in its inclusive justice. This is a very old and honorable poetry, a poetry of news, outraged and doleful, longing for acquittal."—Richard Howard
"Ejo chronicles two years in Africa on the edge of utter meltdown, a Rwanda where Derick Burleson—an outsider, a teacher of English—found both joyful community and the signs of an approaching disaster of unthinkable proportions. Burleson understands that it is language that divides us, that constructs our difference; the paradox at the core of this heartfelt book is that this same language is the material of poetry. These are fascinating, formally alert, deeply engaged poems, full of heart, humanity, and an excoriating sorrow."—Mark Doty
From the Publisher
EJO is the Kinyarwandan word which means both yesterday and tomorrow.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"He Woke Beneath the Bodies of His Friends",
By
This review is from: Ejo: Poems, Rwanda, 1991-1994 (Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry) (Paperback)
Derik Burleson's brave and terrifying book about genocide in Rwanda broke my heart.As a PCV in the seventies, I knew many of the places he loved, Lake Kivu, Virunga National Park, and the touristy visit to the gorillas who seemed bored with pounding their chests. Burleson's poems remind this reader of the pain of growing to love a country, then seeing its people destroyed in a bloodbath. Worse yet, destroying one another. One tribe played off against another, thanks to the Belgians and their colonial preference for the Tutsis' aquiline features. His use of imagery seems to draw all of nature into the violence,"the pale and carniiverous orchids," the chameleon's tongue "like a bullwhip," "the thin-featured woman/who sold bright fruit door to door,"--now gone. And everywhere men "fingering their machetes" and bloated bodies in the lakes and rivers. Burleson's use of African folktale, as in the woman who can turn herself into a hyena("Nyavirezi"), is charged with premonitions of what is to come. Most powerful of all for this reader were the Remera poems, written from an African point of view, and recounting sorrow after sorrow. Burleson draws on every poem he ever read, and every moment he spent in Africa, and maybe every experience he had as a human being to write this book and help us to understand what happened, and how it happened.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Echoes,
By A Customer
This review is from: Ejo: Poems, Rwanda, 1991-1994 (Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry) (Paperback)
This is a strong book of poems. It is particularly interesting to me as a linguist. Remera's poems echo the origins of language in a fascinating way. Burlesson is on to something fundamentally human with this work. These are images that CNN never brought to us.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rereadable Poems,
By
This review is from: Ejo: Poems, Rwanda, 1991-1994 (Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry) (Paperback)
Burleson's poems keep pulling me back with thier elegance, their depth of vision and their travels through human existence. I am thankful that he has the courage to write these poems.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
