Böcker av John Eppel

In this, one of his most moving collections John Eppel is at the peak of his poetic powers. His speaker is a wizened soul, mindful of time and mortality, contemplating the cycle of life, the moon and the stars, clouds and rain, rocks, soil, tree, flowers, dogs, cats, birds, toads, spiders, termites and a tiny virus bringing us death. Also featured are beggars, schoolboys, literature and art legends, sons and daughters, grandparents and grandchildren. John Eppel gives a symphony of words about 'our brief eternity.

The Boy Who Loved Camping is the story of Tom seen through two windows of time in a country once called Rhodesia.

Eppel's poems are images from nature and loaded with more than nostalgia. See them as flowers laid like wreaths at the site of man's inhumanity to man. Born in South Africa in 1947, John Eppel was raised in Zimbabwe, where he still lives. His first novel, D G G Berry's The Great North Road, won the M-Net prize and was listed in the Weekly Mail & Guardian as one of the best 20 South African books in English published between 1948 and 1994.

When Mr George loses his job teaching English at a private secondary school in Bulawayo, ehis pension payout, after forty years of full-time service, bought him two jam doughnuts and a soft tomato.i When he backs his uninsured white Ford Escort into a brand new Mercedes Benz, the out-of-court settlement sees him giving up his house to the complainant, Beauticious Nyamayakanuna, and becoming her domestic servant. Through the prism of this engaging post-colonial role reversal, and spiced with Georgeis lessons on Shakespeare, John Eppel draws down the curtain on one particular white man in Africa. But before itis time to go, George will delight us with the antics of his literature classes; his various arrests n all timed to coincide with the police chiefis need for help with essays on Hamlet and A Grain of Wheat; his keen eye for flora and fauna; and the long trek back through the hundred years of his familyis Zimbabwean past, as he returns an abandoned child to her home. Eppel has satirized the racial politics of southern Africa in many of his previous novels. In Absent: The English Teacher he turns his gaze inwards for a generous and richly rewarding parody of the land of his birth.

'If the form of my poetry is thoroughly European, its content is thoroughly African.' Thus the author introduces this collection of some eighty of his poems written between the late 1950s and the present: from the settler period through the civil war, to independence and neo- colonialism. The poems explore the contradictions and creative possibilities of an identity that is at once native and white, European and African. The voice is varyingly satirical, confessional, outraged and affectionate.