Seifu Metaferia Translated from the Amharic by Alemu Tebeje & Chris Beckett
They say “come here! go there!” with a gun to emphasize their words “just drive me, please!” they say mixing polite and threatening because they like to blur distinctions — the powerful yes, life itself is a cold draught but once upon a time our earth was ours one unit, whole not cut up in a thousand pieces not spoiled like she is now before things got so messed up she was just herself and hugged us all no matter if our skin was black or white
"Seifu Metaferia is an Ethiopan literary giant in the shape of a small elderly poet, professor and researcher of oral/children’s poetry. In his house in Addis Ababa, he read me some poems, including A World...: not a difficult poem to translate, no tricky constructions or ambiguous word plays, Seifu simply picks his target and shoots from the hip! Written many years ago, the poem’s exposition of how power forces and cajoles feels completely relevant today."
"The self-mocking character study 'Mrs. Arbuthnot,' first published in the TLS in 1960 and then in The Best Beast (1969), is characteristic of Smith’s poems in its questioning of the impulse to write at all, and of its delight in wrong-footing the reader."
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"I’m not that old, but I’ve lived long enough to know that the lion’s share of my life is behind me. I know there are relationships I can’t hold on to, and places I can’t return to. I’m just beginning to see 'real time,' the arc of almost half a century, and how the generational waves, both violent and beautiful, define our species."
