Rhythms of Creation

An Decade of Okike Poetry

An anthology of poems from Okike, An African Journal of New Writing, inspired and edited by Chinua Achebe. The journal published writers throughout the flourishing period of creativity in the seventies, and was historically a major movement in African literature.

The work contains 190 poems from 87 poets. The poets are from Nigeria and other African countries. Some are established writers - Dennis Brutus, Kofi Akoonor and Wole Soyinka; and the volume includes a number of powerful poems by the father of modern African literature himself. Others are lesser known as poets but still of considerable literary stature, for example, Micere Githae- Mugo, a Kenyan, who co-authored a play with Ngugi, and several South Africans, writing from inside, or in exile from, the apartheid regime.

The anthology is organised thematically under the headings: 'the words we use'; 'of god and nature'; 'of men and women'; 'of hopes and doubts'; 'of past and present'; 'of troubled times'; 'of heroes and cowards'; and 'a call to freedom'.

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