Traces of a Life: A Collection of Elegies and Praise Poems

by Abena P.A. Busia

To read the poems in Traces of a Life is to receive a heroic and tender gift – the language for times that renders us wordless. This is a treasure of precious memories, especially those of the poet, carefully and lovingly presented. Frustrations of history and politics jostle with the nobler passions that define our fundamental humanity so that in some of the poems, there is a swift transition from elation and hope to anxiety and despair. Yes, let’s light another candle for women poet warriors because Abena Adompim Pokua Busia is certainly one of them.

144 pages, Paperback

First published October 31, 2008

About the author

Born in Accra, Ghana, [in 1953,] she spent the first years of her childhood at home as well as in Holland and Mexico, before her family settled in Oxford, England, where she had her secondary and university education; she read for a BA in English Language and Literature at St Anne's College (1976) and a DPhil in Social Anthropology at St Antony's College (1984). She has been an external tutor at Ruskin College, Oxford, a visiting lecturer in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Yale University and has held post-doctoral fellowships at Bryn Mawr College and the Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California at Los Angeles. She is now Associate Professor of English at Rutgers State University, where she has taught since 1981.

(from Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby)

Reviews

[Nana Fredua-Agyeman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Traces of a Life: A Collection of Elegies and Praise Poems (Ayebia, 2008; 124) by Abena P.A. Busia is an anthology of poems, diary entries (sort of) and memorial lectures. The general theme is that of loss - of loved ones, of country, of innocence, of self, of privacy, of culture; but also found interspersed amongst the loss are poems celebrating anniversaries: marriages and birthdays. And even these ones have the pathos of loss built into them; for what could be as sad as celebrating a marriage anniversary in exile.

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