Spirit Brides

Muzanenhamo Togara

Togara Muzanenhamo's first collection of poems evokes a number of worlds, familiar and unfamiliar. He takes us from his vivid, vanished childhood in Zimbabwe to Europe, where he lived for some years, making as he goes the stories and connections that coax a meaning out of time and change. These are less poems of memory than of creation. There exists a fractured world, partly hidden from the poet, in which dream makes a different kind of order. This unpredictable, parallel world provides an undertone, a treacherous reflection. "Spirit Brides" combines the real and the surreal, stone and steel on the one hand, and air on the other. The plains of the veldt in Zimbabwe are as tangible as the bookstore in Antwerp or the bottle-shop in Paris. There is a language here that fills some of the troubling silences of our time, that engages death, violence and, most particularly, love.

About the Author

Togara Muzanenhamo was born to Zimbabwean parents in Lusaka, Zambia in 1975. He was brought up in Zimbabwe, and then went on to study in The Hague and Paris. He became a journalist in Harare and worked for a film script production company. His work has appeared in magazines in Europe, South Africa and Zimbabwe, and was included in Carcanet's anthology "New Poetries" in 2002.

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