Poetry
Songs from the Wilderness
Frank Kobina Parkes · 1965
Synopsis
The poet's only collection. It includes “African Heaven”, which Langston Hughes had chosen as early as 1960 for his anthology: a call, “Give me black souls”, that asks for black souls, drums of wood and sheepskin, a calabash adorned with blue beads, and in which critics read a eulogy of the colour black. The verse is free, rhythmic, assured and shot through with humour; other poems, such as “Echoes of Eden”, found their way into Ghanaian anthologies.
Context
The collection appeared in London in 1965, from the University of London Press, and remained the only book by its author, a poet read chiefly in anthologies. His texts had first circulated on the airwaves: several appear in Voices of Ghana, which in 1958 brought together contributions to Ghanaian radio. Hughes, introducing the poem in 1960, saw in it the consciousness of negritude and a racial pride that colonialism had not been able to efface. Mbella Sonne Dipoko hailed in Présence africaine one of the fine poets then writing about Africa and the world.
Who it is for
Poems in English, in short free verse, never translated into French; it helps to know the Négritude movement.
Prizes and reception
The New African hailed it as a landmark for Ghanaian poetry and for African poetry as a whole; “African Heaven” remains his most quoted poem.