Chris Beckett grew up in 1960s Ethiopia, a country he describes as a
'barefoot empire, home of black-maned lions...old priests decked out
like butterflies and blazing young singers of Ethio-jazz'. Ethiopia Boy
plunges the reader into praise poems that sing and boast and glory in
the colours and textures of this extraordinary country. Here is a world
of feasting on spicy kikwot and of famine sucking the water from rivers,
of lion buses and a prayer child, where Earth sings greetings to the
feet that walk on her.
Haunted by the memory of his friend Abebe, the cook's son, Beckett
celebrates and laments a lost boyhood in poems of vivid immediacy.
COVER PAINTING Isao Miura, Crossing the Water (oil on canvas).
Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.