Category: Poetry

Poetry Study: Kumukanda by Kayo Chingonyi

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Kayo Chingonyi’s first published poetry collection is called Kumukanda, a word from Luvale, his father’s first language from the country of Zambia where Kayo was born. Meaning ‘initiation’, it’s the name given to the rituals that mark the passage into adulthood of Luvale, Chokwe, Luchazi and Mbunda boys, from Zambia. As part of these rites, the boys live away from their homes in the bush, where they are taught traditional skills, learn the history of their tribes, and receive wisdom that takes them into manhood. A special day, makishi, marks the return of the initiated as men, and a celebratory festival is held. In an author’s note, the writer explains that this poetry collection “approximates such rites of passage in the absence of my original culture.”

Poetry Study: Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong

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While regular readers of poetry know better than to equate a poem’s speaker with the author, in Vuong’s case, his poems are personal and confessional, exploring his family’s history, journey to America, his adolescence, his experience of being a young gay man in a homophobic environment, and his formative years as a writer. His fractured family history looms large over the collection which explores themes of maternal support, paternal abandonment, the effects of generational trauma, and of migration as a consequence of war. Vuong’s collection goes back in time to the fall of Saigon, and forward to the future (at one point Vuong addresses an imaginary son he’s yet to have), all the while using his profound imagination to fill the gaps and answer the questions of his life.

Poetry Study: Charlotte Mew

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On a modest London street in Bloomsbury in 1913 called Devonshire Street stood a tiny independent bookshop by the name of The Poetry Bookshop. It’s proprietor was Harold Munro, and he ran this friendly neighbourhood store until 1926. As well as selling books of poetry, Harold also published – and it’s thanks to him that Charlotte Mew, a sometimes shy-and-silent young woman from Bloomsbury, found her audience. Invited to the shop by Harold’s assistant Alida Klemantaski, while Mew had never sought fame, she agreed to the publication of The Farmer’s Bride in 1916.

Poetry Study: John Keats

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He died young and in love, passing away from tuberculosis at 25. But the work he left behind — much of it written in just a few short years — is acclaimed and has achieved cultural significance. His odes and epics were musically unmatched and emotionally urgent, and, like other Romantic poets, he strove for the eternal and ‘sublime’, trying through poetry to explore the “untrodden region[s] of [his] mind.”