Please enter an email address
|
 |
|
|
|
| |
|
Praise Songs For Aliens |
The Blurb
Segun Lee-French populates his poetry with a medley of voices in a breezy and yet complex navigation of time, culture, memory and dream. Drawing on Nigerian praise song, imagism and the Afro-surrealist expressionism of Baraka, Joans and Cesaire, he allows a collision of atmospheres, ghosts, moments and location to provoke emotion. Read and admire.
Back Cover
Praise Songs For Aliens is Segun Lee-French's debut collection. The poems reflect his experiences in the UK and Nigeria. He takes us on a journey embracing the pain of separation, love as an act of immersion, the fragility of belonging and the impossibility of stasis.
Top
|
|
|
Author's Bio
Nigerian Mancunian Segun has worked as a pot washer, cleaner, pop singer, jazz dancer, telephonist, newspaper vendor, poet, playwright, post worker, waiter, club promoter and community activist. Segun’s poetry questions assumptions of what means to be British, playfully contrasting his Yoruba roots with his Mancunian upbringing. As a writer, he has worked extensively in a variety of schools, prisons, and youth centres. In 1999, Segun’s fierce belief in the power of writing and performance to set people free led him to found Manchester’s Speakeasy People poetry collective, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. Segun is currently commissioned by Theatre Writing Partnership to write Palm Wine & Stout, a new theatre show for rural touring about his Nigerian roots.
Top
|
|
|
Extract
Night market (Ikorodu Road)
Ah!
You touched me with yr hem just now.
I am a boundless book of praise,
no wind can scatter me!
Yes, let the rain blot every word,
I'm not afraid.
Tonight, you speak in mud,
yams piled up on heads, in pepper soup & cracked enamel plates.
With Guinness Foreign Extra
yr tongue vibrates cicadas, serenades the flickering stalls: humble pyramids of oranges – green & sweet – you sing to the suya man, as he flips strips of lamb over hissing coals with bare fingers, shadows pause to greet.
& when they take the light away,
you just jut yr lips & hum to the kerosene lamps
till the generator
picks up
the song.
Top
|
|
|
The Quotes
Of brothers from another planet
If enlightened societies, particularly those in Africa and its Diaspora, do not make distinctions between song and dance, or even music and life, neither do they separate singer and playwright from poet. Rivers of expression flow from a central creative sea, one that suggests vocalists may always reveal themselves as practitioners of verse, when a subject calls for the shadow play of stanza and the light of epiphany.
So it has come to pass. Segun Lee-French, close to two decades after a stint as a singer with the band Earthling, unveils in this ripe, aromatic debut a poetic voice that has matured steadily through long seasons. In that time he has written for the stage and continued to make music with much grace. He has also bathed head and toe in the historical waters of the ‘Negritude’ champions of the Caribbean such as Aimé Césaire and Edouard Glissant and seen the parallels and contrasts with their concept of ‘blackness’ in the oeuvre of the great African-American firebrand Amiri Baraka.
Praise Songs For Aliens has its own lyricism though. Segun sees and hears the poetry in market places that are full of the youth of fruit and the age of enamel plates, serenaded by tacit melodies humming in a kerosene lamp. He makes ballads of childhood yearnings in Manchester, of coming of age in Nigeria, of lessons learned in Cuba, of black angels whose lives were shortened by the long arm of the law. He plants all of these thoughts and feelings in the solid ground of reality. And then lets his words grow tall and strong into magical song.
Kevin Le Gendre, London, 2009.
Top
|
|
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
|
