One of Gambia's leading young poets and writers is the editor of this collection of new voices of poetry from West Africa. The countries covered are Nigeria, Benin, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Cote d'Ivoire, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo. A brief biographical note is included on each poet, and a selection of their poems. The poets were selected as the most representative of the new and variegated scene of contemporary West African poetic creativity and life.

Previous studies of African poetry have tended to concentrate either on its political content or on its relationship to various European schools. This book examines West African poetry in English and French against the background of oral poetry in the vernacular. Do the roots of such poetry lie in Africa or in Europe? In committing their work to writing, do poets lose more than they gain? Can the immediacy of oral performance ever be recovered? Robert Fraser's account of two centuries of West African verse examines its subjugation to a succession of international styles: from the heroic couplet to the austerity of experimental Modernism. Successive chapters take us through the Négritude movement and the emergence of anglophone free verse in the 1950s to the rediscovery in recent years of the neglected springs of orality, which is the subject of the concluding chapter.

A collection of essays and reviews, both favourable and negative, about the Igbo poet. The book begins with a memorial essay by Chinua Achebe. Other contributors examine the imagery that Okigbo drew from nature, history and politics, exploring the surrealistic qualities of his work.

This anthology presents the voices of a new generation of African poets, drawn from across the continent and representing a wide range of themes, styles and ideologies. These contemporary voices have been shaped in the realities of postcolonial Africa from the mid-1970s to the end of the 1990s.