Buchi Emecheta's Joys of Motherhood Enters Its 28th Printing

We're proud to announce that Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood, one of the most popular titles on our list, is going into its 28th printing. The book, which John Updike called "a graceful, touching, ironically titled tale," follows a Nigerian woman who has devoted her entire life towards the raising of her children, and who suddenly finds herself struggling to adjust to the colonial influences that threaten to overturn her entire way of life.

The book cuts very close to Emecheta's own experience. Born in Nigeria in 1944, she struggled under the gender bias of the time, fighting to receive an education. After marrying, she moved to London, where she raised five children and suffered her marriage. Writing was her only reprieve. Finally, she left her husband to raise her children alone while earning a degree in sociology from London University. Today she lives in London and is widely recognized as one of the most significant voices in modern African literature.

Emecheta's story is inspiring and her influence continues to be felt throughout the world. We're proud to have published so many of her incredible titles:

Poetry Week Two, Day Four/Five: Jorge Luis Borges

Okay, so we missed yesterday, but we're closing out the week with a stunner, and probably one of the most appropriate caps to our theme of poetry on poetry. Today's piece is by inimitable Argentinian poet and writer, Jorge Luis Borges. The poem can be found in the collection, To a Nightingale, edited by Edward Hirsch, which tracks the presence of the sonorous bird in the work of some of the world's greatest poets, from Sappho to, well, Borges.

To The Nightingale

Out of what secret English summer evening
or night on the incalculable Rhine,
lost among all the nights of my long night,
could it have come to my unknowing ear,
your song, encrusted with mythology,
nightingale of Virgil and the Persians?
Perhaps I never heard you, but my life
is bound up with your life, inseparably.
The symbol for you is the wandering spirit
in a book of enigmas. The poet, El Marino,
nicknamed you the "siren of the forest";
you sing throughout the night of Juliet
and through the intricate pages of the Latin
and from his pinewoods, Heine, that other
nightingale of Germany and Judea,
called you mockingbird, firebird, bird of mourning.
Keats heard your song for everyone, forever.
There is not one among the shimmering names
people have given you across the earth
that does not seek to match your own music,
nightingale of the dark. The Muslim dreamed you
in the delirium of ecstasy,
his breast pierced by the thorn of the sung rose
you redden with your blood. Assiduously
in the black evening I contrive this poem,
nightingale of the sands and all the seas,
that in exultation, memory, and fable,
you burn with love and die in liquid song.

Poetry Week Two, Day Three: Gongora

We continue our poetry journey with a poem from Luis de Góngora y Argote, the sixteenth-century Spanish poet, whose work Pablo Picasso transcribed and illustrated in the late 1940s. This centuries-spanning collaboration between artist and poet was presented in Gongora, first published in Paris in 1948. The English translation is by Alan S. Trueblood.

The Poet
On the Most Critical Year of His Life

Lycius, in this, the westernmost,
the span most critical of all your life,
any unsteady footing is a fall,
any slippery fall a precipice.

Your gait is faltering? Shore your mind up then.
Finding that solid earth is giving way,
would any prudent man, forewarned by dust,
stay on to see the edifice collapse?

Not just its skin, but with the skin, its years
the venemous snake shall cast away.
Mankind, not so. Oh blindness of man's thought!

How happy he, who having laid away
the burdensome part of self in silent stone,
consigns the weightless to the sapphire sphere.

Poetry Week Two, Day Two: Gu Cheng

Today we travel China in the final quarter of the 20th Century for a poem from Gu Cheng, who found his way out of obscurity and rural exile to international acclaim, making a name for himself as the voice of a new generation of artists and thinker in China. His work is translated by Aaron Crippen in the collection Nameless Flowers: Selected Poems of Gu Cheng.

Curriculum Vitae

I'm a sorrowful child,
never grown up.
From the grassy north shore
I followed
a bright white road into
a city full of gears,
narrow alleys,
wooden shacks, each lowly heart.
In a bland haze of smoke I
keep telling green stories.
I believe in my listeners--
the sky, and sea spray.
They will cover my everything,
cover my undiscoverable
grave. I know then
the grasses and wildflowers
will gather, as the light dims,
kissing over my sorrow.

Even More Poetry for National Poetry Month

Since last week was so much fun, we're extending our poem-on-poetry-a-day run for a few more days!

Today, we're moving slightly out of Braziller territory with two prose poems by Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, whose work is considered by Charles Simic in his new book, The Renegade.

Here's Simic's commentary on Herbert's distinct sense of humor, followed by the poems:

One of the favorite strategies of Herbert is what Baranczak calls "unmasking," the unveiling of the true face of some object or idea which up to that moment had been concealed by its false appearance. A clock, for example, may appear as the placid face of a miller, full and shiny as an apple with one dark hair creeping across it, when, in fact, if you were to look inside, you would discover a nest of worms or the bowels of an anthill. Although Herbert's intentions are often satirical, his way of defamiliarizing the familiar reminds me of folk humor. It's the same freee play of the imagination and jocularity one encounters in fairy tales, riddles and creation myths, which thrive on making the familiar strange. These two prose poems show how such unmasking works:

MOON

I don't understand how you can write poems about the moon. It's fat and slovenly. It picks the noses of chimneys. Its favorite thing to do is climb under the bed and sniff at your shoes.(1)

HEN

The hen is the best example of what living constantly with humans leads to. She has completely lost the lightness and grace of a bird. Her tail sticks up over her protruding rump like a too large hat in bad taste. Her rare moments of ecstasy, when she stands on one leg and glues up her round eyes with filmy eyelids, are stunningly disgusting. And in addition, that parody of song, throat-slashed supplication over a thing unuterably comic: a round, white, maculated egg.
The hen brings to mind certain poets.(2)

(1. Translated by Alissa Valles.)
(2. Translated by Czeslaw Mislow and Peter Dale Scott.)

(This essay was originally published by the New York Review of Books in 2007, reviewing Zbigniew Herbert's Collected Poems: 1956-1998, from HarperCollins.)

Poetry Week Day Five: Langston Hughes

Poetry week closes with two short, sharp Langston Hughes poems from The Langston Hughes Reader. Think of these as a response to Julia Alvarez's "Poetry Makes Nothing Happen"? Have a great weekend!

Sliver

Cheap little rhymes
A cheap little tune
Are sometimes as dangerous
As a sliver of the moon.

A cheap little tune
to cheap little rhymes
Can cut a man's
Throat sometimes.


Poet to Bigot

I have done so little
For you,
And you have done so little
For me,
That we have good reason
Never to agree.

I, however,
Have such meagre
Power,
Clutching at a
Moment,
While you control
An hour.

But your hour is
A stone.

My moment is
A flower.

Poetry Week Day Four: Taslima Nasrin

For our fourth day of poetry, we have a poem from acclaimed Bangladeshi poet Taslima Nasrin, whose book, The Game in Reverse, was the first volume of her poetry available in English translation. Her work speaks out against the persecution of women in Bangladeshi Muslim society, and she was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 1994.

Thereafter

My sister used to sing wonderful Tagore songs.
She used to love reading Simone de Beauvoir.
Forgetting her midday bath, she immersed herself in Karl Marx,
Gorky, Tolstoy, and Manik's novels.

When she wanted to feel nostalgic, Laura Ingalls Wilder was her favorite.
When she saw a play about war, I remember her crying half the night.

My sister used to read wonderful poetry;
her favorites were Shanka, Niren, Neruda, and Yevtushenko.
My sister loved the forest, not the garden;
she liked sculpture so much she once bought a ticket for Paris.

Now in my sister's poetry notebook
she keeps meticulous accounts of green vegetables,
now she walks around very proudly, loaded with metal ornaments.
She says with pride she no longer thinks about politics.
Let culture go to hell, she couldn't care less.
Dust collects on her sitar, mice nest in her tanpura.
Now she's a smart shopper, bringing home

porcelain dinnerware, fresh carp, and expensive-looking bed sheets.

(Translated by Carolyne Wright)