Poetry
Smoke and Flames
Samuel Chimsoro · 1978
Synopsis
Poems in English, woven with tight metaphors, on human experience in its intimate and social aspects. A sequence of love poems, centred on a woman named Leah, explores what makes perfect love impossible. Another section, titled with a Shona expression, Zuva Huya-Huya, is devoted to the liberation struggle and colonial oppression: it includes poems addressed to well-diggers, on baskets and stones, on the awakening and on the colours that grow.
Context
The collection was published in 1978 in Gweru by Mambo Press. It was its author's first book; he had been writing since the late sixties without sending anything to the magazines or competitions of the colony, and Kizito Muchemwa's anthology, the first of English-language poetry by Africans of Rhodesia, had missed him entirely. His poems speak of colonialism and racial discrimination as much as of intimate life. It was followed by a novel and, in 1990, by a collection in Shona.
Who it is for
In English, a short collection. The poems, dense in images, assume familiarity with Rhodesia in the last years of the war.
Prizes and reception
According to Musaemura Zimunya, it was through this book that most readers discovered the poet; academic criticism has so far studied it little.
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