A collaborative anthology that shares many voices
What you need to know:
- This anthology is a collaborative effort geared towards sharing as many voices as possible across the vast poetry spectrum
Title: The Pearl
Author: Desire Edward Kibirige
Price: Shs25,000
Availability: Aristoc Bookshop
Pages: 144 Published: 2024
“It is actually my third anthology,” says the author. “I featured a few more poets on this edition. But all rights are totally mine. As you will see. I only wanted to create opportunities for others too, more so my friends who never dreamt of getting featured on a publication. They've now been inspired and most of them have projects with Desha Publishing House.”
This anthology is a collaborative effort geared towards sharing as many voices as possible across the vast poetry spectrum. This multiplicity of feelings and thoughts herein serves a mixed bag by which the poets carry the urgency of the moment, capturing its essence so that it stretches across the finite vastness of the human experience. Well, it may actually go further than that.
This is what the poem “My love…” by Kirabo Anthony demonstrates by telling us about love, through his unique poetic lens. And if you and I know anything about love, we know that it is not finite. This is shown in the title, with the use of an ellipsis, as expressed by three dots.
Now, I shall ask you, what does this stanza mean to you? Does it evoke the passions indwelt in your heart? Well, it should. However, since this poem is something of a confessional poem, it expresses the persona’s passions more than it captures your own.
True, good poetry makes the speaker’s feelings your own; but not necessarily. Sometimes a love poem will detach itself from context in order to reveal its own peculiarity.
The persona’s love thus is not yours, it is an expression of its own potential to grow into its romantic possibilities and become what it wants to be. This is the beauty of actual love: its potential, not its actuality. That’s because what love can become is of far more important than what it actually is.
Maybe it is a corporeal love, less rhapsodic than its spiritual parts, such as Nakyanzi Fridahmeron’s poem, “Desire”:
“I thought I was not admired,
Because I was a coward,
I thought I was not productive,
Because I was not admired…”
Love takes courage. That is why the speaker in this poem invokes cowardice, on their part, when love is not readily revealed. The speaker also implies that the admiration that comes with love is an expression of its fearlessness. And this fearlessness is productive of the admiration one attains from a willingness to take the plunge that love demands.
In the poem Helios, we see a departure from this as the speaker takes on more evocative tones in order to say what might have been said by a lot less.
The imagery is somewhat wanton, but that could be deliberate in order to show the expansiveness of feeling. It is also quite cryptic, opening up the reader to a wide vista of interpretation.
I must say, I like a good tribute poem. In Lovely Brother, I find some of what I like.
“Blissful times come and end Doleful moments appear/Suddenly they disappear /he night falls Bringing darkness for hours/The sun rises from the East/Fate joins us to different people/Some fall off on the way/ And we remain with pure friends/That we can never let go/Till death betrays us,” writes Nankya Fatuma, with a special dedication to Taufiq Juma Mutebi, in what may be the most heartfelt poem in this anthology.
