Things Circular

POETRY/AFRICAN STUDIES

Mphande has enriched not only the national poetry of Malawi, but also African and contemporary world poetry. —World Literature Today

No one paints physical Malawi better than Mphande; no one is quite sensitive to the scattered graces of its hills and waters. –Adrian Roscoe

From the experience of voluntary-physical external exile Mphande wistfully recollects and expresses memories of home in his poetry. –Joanna Wood

Mphande’s style is contemplative and strongly descriptive … He has a keen eye and sharp ear, and his poems teem with sensuous images [that] often produce the effect of spontaneous movement and sound in rural landscapes, which he loves to paint in words. –Frank Chipasula,

Professor of Black American Studies,
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

If readers (especially African) should come to poetry by way of Lupenga Mphande’s [poetry], they would not complain that poetry is difficult, obscure, dull and only meant for academics in the ivory tower. Rather they find poetry a very interesting subject. –Tanure Ojaide

Professor of Africana Studies,
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lupenga Mphande is currently a Professor of African Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. He is among Malawi’s leading linguists, poets, and writers. A prize-winning poet, he has published two volumes of his poems, Crackle at Midnight (1998) and Messages Left Behind (2011), and contributed many  poems to such major international anthologies as When My Brothers Come Home: Poems from Central and Southern Africa (1985), The Heinemann Book of African Poetry in English (1991), Poems – Deep and Dangerous (Cambridge School Anthologies 1995), The Poetry of Men’s Lives: An International Anthology (2004), Bending the Bow: An Anthology of African Love Poetry (2009).