Ballade of Halima Zuru

    Pamphlets

Two Anglo-Saxon elegies

 

The Wanderer deals with a man caught between two worlds, the old militaristic culture of the Anglo Saxon 'commitatus' and the new individualised Christianity, but reflects a much longer term tension between the way we value ourselves - in terms of peers and leaders, or in terms of self or God.

 

These are poems that appeared in magazines after my first book, Sabon Gari, but have not been collected since.  They don't fit in with the structure of Letter to Patience, and First the Desert is an imaginary translation from Hausa.  The poems deal mainly with Nigeria

The title poem is based on the experience of an actual bar girl in Kano and Zaria - a friend of the the poet's former wife