Tenderfoot by Chris Beckett
How does a boy grow up happy with hunger and inequality in the world?
A tenderfoot is a novice, unaccustomed to hardship. Here he is a white boy growing up in 1960’s Ethiopia, a place and people he loves even as he learns his own privilege and foreignness. Later he remembers rumours of a famine in the mountains and imagines a boy his own age living through it, surviving on angry couplets, a sort of diary. Years after, he sees this famine-boy grown up and questions him. A sequel to Ethiopia Boy, his book teems with praise shouts for Asfaw the cook, for the boys living as minibus conductors or chewing-gum sellers, even for Tenderfoot’s own stomach that hangs ‘like a leopard in a thorn acacia tree’. It is about waking up to storms and droughts, hunger and desire, to donkeys who quote Samuel Johnson and a red bicycle that invites you on a poem tour of Addis Ababa; to what is happening around but also inside the boy’s mind and body, a human transformation!
ISBN: 978 1 784109 71 4 Carcanet Poetry, July 2020 Price: £11.99
CLICK ON THE PIC TO VISIT CARCANET AND BUY TENDERFOOT!
How does a boy grow up happy with hunger and inequality in the world?
A tenderfoot is a novice, unaccustomed to hardship. Here he is a white boy growing up in 1960’s Ethiopia, a place and people he loves even as he learns his own privilege and foreignness. Later he remembers rumours of a famine in the mountains and imagines a boy his own age living through it, surviving on angry couplets, a sort of diary. Years after, he sees this famine-boy grown up and questions him. A sequel to Ethiopia Boy, his book teems with praise shouts for Asfaw the cook, for the boys living as minibus conductors or chewing-gum sellers, even for Tenderfoot’s own stomach that hangs ‘like a leopard in a thorn acacia tree’. It is about waking up to storms and droughts, hunger and desire, to donkeys who quote Samuel Johnson and a red bicycle that invites you on a poem tour of Addis Ababa; to what is happening around but also inside the boy’s mind and body, a human transformation!
ISBN: 978 1 784109 71 4 Carcanet Poetry, July 2020 Price: £11.99
CLICK ON THE PIC TO VISIT CARCANET AND BUY TENDERFOOT!
SONGS WE LEARN FROM TREES
The first ever anthology of Ethiopian Amharic poetry in English
edited and translated by Chris Beckett & Alemu Tebeje
A finalist in the 2021 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry, Songs is packed with all the wit, energy and heartache of this stunningly beautiful country, In nearly 300 pages, the book includes Folk/Religious poems, ten much loved 20th Century poets and 30 exciting contemporary poets working both inside and outside Ethiopia. Chris Abani, Glenna Luschei judge, writes: This book is a vital contribution to African letters, rendering into English and in one volume, a rare and vibrant diversity of voices from a country oft ignored in continental letters. It holds all the lyricism, haunted echoes, and lament and praise song that you know can only come from a people whose search for the sublime was not limited to mountain churches, but to churches carved deep into the search, the complete scale of the human, from the body to the highest soul. I am grateful for this work and cannot recommend it enough.
ISBN: 978 1 78410 947 9
Carcanet Classics, May 2020
Price: £18.99
CLICK ON THE PIC TO VISIT CARCANET AND BUY SONGS WE LEARN FROM TREES!
Ethiopia Boy by Chris Beckett
A boyhood recreated in praise shouts and boasts.
Julian Stannard writes in Poetry Review: Ethiopia Boy by Chris Beckett is a delight. For a moment I thought of Orlando, that mischievous, nevertheless generous, love letter by Virginia Woolf for Vita Sackville-West. Like Orlando, Beckett’s collection travels through time as we are given dazzling vignettes which, without any pedagogic insistence, teach us through poetry about a country which has too often been mired in journalistic accounts of political catastrophe and terrible famine...Ethiopia Boy is, in fact, a love letter. The nostalgia for for Haile Selassie’s “glamorous barefoot empire, home of black-maned lions and blazing young singers of Ethio-Jazz”, ...is reinforced by the poet’s continuing engagement with, and translation of, Ethiopian poetry. It is a love letter to Abebe, the cook’s son (the object of the English boy’s affections), and the opening piece – an extended apostrophe, a type of litany, unabashed – is emblematic....
ISBN: 978 1 906188 09 2
Carcanet/Oxford Poets, March 2013
Price: £8.96
CLICK ON THE PIC TO VISIT CARCANET AND BUY ETHIOPIA BOY!
A boyhood recreated in praise shouts and boasts.
Julian Stannard writes in Poetry Review: Ethiopia Boy by Chris Beckett is a delight. For a moment I thought of Orlando, that mischievous, nevertheless generous, love letter by Virginia Woolf for Vita Sackville-West. Like Orlando, Beckett’s collection travels through time as we are given dazzling vignettes which, without any pedagogic insistence, teach us through poetry about a country which has too often been mired in journalistic accounts of political catastrophe and terrible famine...Ethiopia Boy is, in fact, a love letter. The nostalgia for for Haile Selassie’s “glamorous barefoot empire, home of black-maned lions and blazing young singers of Ethio-Jazz”, ...is reinforced by the poet’s continuing engagement with, and translation of, Ethiopian poetry. It is a love letter to Abebe, the cook’s son (the object of the English boy’s affections), and the opening piece – an extended apostrophe, a type of litany, unabashed – is emblematic....
ISBN: 978 1 906188 09 2
Carcanet/Oxford Poets, March 2013
Price: £8.96
CLICK ON THE PIC TO VISIT CARCANET AND BUY ETHIOPIA BOY!
Sketches from the Poem Road
(after Matsuo Basho's The Narrow Road to the Deep North)
by Isao Miura & Chris Beckett
Shortlisted for the TED HUGHES AWARD 2015
Part of a creative collaboration with the artist Isao Miura made in the footsteps of Matsuo Basho, which included exhibitions of drawings, paintings, poems and sculpture in Covent Garden, Deptford and Oxford, this pamphlet was published by Hagi Press and shortlisted for the 2015 Ted Hughes Award. Poet and artist set off on an interpretative journey in the footsteps of Matsuo Basho and his ‘Narrow Road to the Deep North’, which he undertook in spring 1689. Between them they travel from text to image, and often back again, creating an interwoven series of poems, translations, drawings and sculpture in the footsteps of the Japanese poet. The judges commented: “A new road to the deep north that combines translation, sketches and original poetry. This exquisite work maps with wonderful modesty the pathways between the ancient and the modern.”
ISBN: 978-0-9931691-0-6
Hagi Press, Feb 2015
Price: £12
hagipress.weebly.com
(after Matsuo Basho's The Narrow Road to the Deep North)
by Isao Miura & Chris Beckett
Shortlisted for the TED HUGHES AWARD 2015
Part of a creative collaboration with the artist Isao Miura made in the footsteps of Matsuo Basho, which included exhibitions of drawings, paintings, poems and sculpture in Covent Garden, Deptford and Oxford, this pamphlet was published by Hagi Press and shortlisted for the 2015 Ted Hughes Award. Poet and artist set off on an interpretative journey in the footsteps of Matsuo Basho and his ‘Narrow Road to the Deep North’, which he undertook in spring 1689. Between them they travel from text to image, and often back again, creating an interwoven series of poems, translations, drawings and sculpture in the footsteps of the Japanese poet. The judges commented: “A new road to the deep north that combines translation, sketches and original poetry. This exquisite work maps with wonderful modesty the pathways between the ancient and the modern.”
ISBN: 978-0-9931691-0-6
Hagi Press, Feb 2015
Price: £12
hagipress.weebly.com
Just a Nobody
by Hama Tuma
(transl Chris Beckett & Alemu Tebeje)
ISBN: 978-1-9998146-0-1
Tamrat Books, Oct 2017
Price: £4
www.tamratbooks.com
Greetings to the People of Europe
by Alemu Tebeje
(transl Chris Beckett & Alemu Tebeje)
ISBN: 978-1-9998146-1-8
Tamrat Books, Oct 2018
Price: £4
www.tamratbooks.com
In Search of Fat
by Bewketu Seyoum
(transl Chris Beckett & Alemu Tebeje)
ISBN: 978-1905233380
flipped eye, March 2012
Price: £4
flippedeye.net/product/in-search-of-fat/
by Hama Tuma
(transl Chris Beckett & Alemu Tebeje)
ISBN: 978-1-9998146-0-1
Tamrat Books, Oct 2017
Price: £4
www.tamratbooks.com
Greetings to the People of Europe
by Alemu Tebeje
(transl Chris Beckett & Alemu Tebeje)
ISBN: 978-1-9998146-1-8
Tamrat Books, Oct 2018
Price: £4
www.tamratbooks.com
In Search of Fat
by Bewketu Seyoum
(transl Chris Beckett & Alemu Tebeje)
ISBN: 978-1905233380
flipped eye, March 2012
Price: £4
flippedeye.net/product/in-search-of-fat/