Carrying Knowledge Up a Palm Tree: Poetry

by Taban Lo Liyong

* from USA. Will take 25-35 days

Genres: Poetry, South Sudan

100 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1997

About the author

Taban Lo Liyong (born 1939) is one of Africa's well-known poets and writers of fiction and literary criticism. His political views, as well as his on-going denigration of the post-colonial system of education in East Africa, have inspired criticism and controversy since the late 1960s.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Phạm N.]

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...#

[Riva Hadi]

This poetry book is light-hearted and yet philosophical, Taban Lo Liyong's poetry flows effortlessly and belies the public mistrust of modern African poetry as academic and dry. This book is a compilation of modern African poetic tradition, it’s full of wit, humor, and word-play that any reader will feel happy to indulge in. The poetry in this book is present-oriented, indeed even future-oriented, his poems draw on tradition, not only through references to traditional characters and events and in his fable-like use of animals, but also in their form. The poems in this book are sometimes depicted as riddles, or have moral lessons at the end. lo Liyong use of paradoxes and his exclusiveness prompt the reader to an increased degree of alertness. His poems say exactly what readers expect them to say from the way they begin, sometimes bitterly or ironical. His poems are inspired both by traditional forms and by modern experiment, lo Liyong produces subtle and moving poems out of the pain and confusion of the community in which he lives.