Items

• Ain't I a woman

  In "Things fall apart," critic Rob Nixon reviews the Soho Square V: A collection of new writing from Africa. Nixon writes that the collection "abandons any pretence at making a representative selection" with "twenty-one of the thirty-two contributors" being from Southern Africa. Excerpt: "Soho Square V has offerings from some of the leading figures in African literature: a story by Ama Ata Aidoo, an essay by Nadine Gordimer, and a Brutus poem, but they are far from their best."
• Second Crop

  A. Moore reviews "African Writing Today," an anthology edited by Ezekiel Mphahlele. Excerpt: "In a field where the number of anthologies threatens to outstrip the output of original work, where the same stories and poems tend to crop up again and again, and where collection of texts is too often offered as a substitute for critical evaluation, the appearance of a new anthology seems to present a suitable occasion for demanding the purpose of it all... At the other end of Africa, Ama Ata Aidoo of Ghana discovers her [compassion] by feeling for the thread of their speech as it strives to catch hold of meaning in a dark stream of events..."
• Lingua Franca, Lingua Poetica

  [Excerpt]: "As a by-product of the Cardiff poetry conference, here we have about 60,000 English words that 140 young men, of virtually all races, have felt impelled to put down on paper. How different the men must be, what different motives must have compelled them to write not only these particular words but to write words at all... The first feeling this anthology produces, then, is something like awe at the degree of world-wide understanding that it registers. The poets come from twenty-two countries, but nearly all have some dash of that special intuition with language--in this case, with English--that makes a man a poet. That said, of course discriminations must begin... And one or two voices stand out as very rich, strong and personal, like the Nigerian Gabriel Okara..."
• Longmans

  The announcement features African writers whose novels/collections have recently been published. Major poets include Wole Soyinka (Black Orpheus), John Pepper Clark (A Reed in the Tide) and Christina Ama Ata Aidoo (The Dilemma of a Ghost). Excerpt: "The Dilemma of a Ghost: Christina Ama Ata Aidoo. A lively play in five acts. It is set in Ghana and tells of problems in a Ghanaian family when the eldest son brings home an Afro-American wife."
• Who's Reading Whom

  "Paul Bailey's Memoirs, An Immaculate Mistake, have just been published."
• Notes towards an understanding of Yeats

  "How fourtunate is Mr. Charles Madge who in 1962 "solved once and for all the iconographic origin of 'Leda and the Swan'"
• After indignation, what?

  "African Writing Today besides introducing us to writers from all over the continent, introduces many to each other."
• P. E. N. Poets' Choice
• Diary

  "Controversy is inevitable, as the likes of Wendy Cope (but not Carol Ann Duffy) Buchi Emecheta, (not Ben Okri), and Hugo Williams (but not Simon Armitage) have made the cut."
• A bevy of writers all under the influence

  "He is immensely knowledgeable about the mainstream writings about Shakespeare from Ben Johnson - Ben Okri--the latter contributed about a black person's complex reactions to Otello."
• The Best of the Best?

  "Every 10 years, starting in1983, Granta has published a special edition of its magazine devoted to the 20 novelists under the age of 40 it deems the leading lights of British fiction."
• SOME ENGLISH

  Graham Greene, Angus WIlson, Anthony Powell, Nigel Dennis, F.R. Leaves... there, to start with, are a few who are not represented in Karl Miller's anthology of writing in England in the past fifteen years.
• The Times Literary Supplement
• Minority Poets

  Patiently, South Africa, in spite of its real lack of anything approaching a cultural climate, in spite of its poverty of literary magazines, its dearth of serious readers, does something to poets, native or visiting.
• OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OVERSEAS

  Believing that the early poetry of Africa has been overrated and represented well enough elsewhere, Mr. Butler has therefore given most of his space to later writers, in whom a more natural diction than the earlier ones practiced is easily discernable...
• Handiwork

  These quotations are not from the publisher's blurb, nor from reviewers of other journals. They are P.J Clark's estimation, in his introduction, of his own achievement. If he sounds pleased with himself, it is because he has reason to be.
• Briefly

  This most anticipated of Oxford anthologies has 658 poems of ferwer than fourteen lines (in order to exclude sonnets), one of sixteen (Pound's "The Lake Isle"), and a number of record-breaking features, such as thirty-pages of contents.