Grieving forests

This is a collection of village narrative poems mainly set in rural Limpopo that searches into the complexity of the past and how historical events impact on the present. Although the poems are imagined along the Marxist dialectic, they’re fresh imaginative creations featuring a strong element of surprise, spiritual mysticism, experimenting with form, delving into unknown poetic avenues, creating new music, exploring new sounds and taking risks. The long and intense poem, Ancestral wealth, which is a tribute to the poet’s father, reflects on death and its impact through the effective application of various stylistic elements and poetic devices, thus immortalising the life of a rural South African. Overall the poems, including retrospective and experimental ones, condemn the free market economic system and all that it seems to necessitate: the degradation of ecology, indifference to human suffering and the alienation of vulnerable social groups

BILAKHULU! : Longer Poems

VONANI BILA was born in 1972 in Shirley village, Limpopo, where he still lives. He is the author of five books of poems in English and eight story-books for newly literate adult readers in Sepedi, Xitsonga and English. Bila is a driving force in South African poetry - founding editor of the Timbila poetry journal, publisher of Timbila books and founder of Timbila Writers' Village, a rural retreat centre for writers. Married with three children, he teaches in the Department of English Studies at the University of Limpopo, and in the MA in Creative Writing at Rhodes University