Catalogue - New Works (Ficton & non-ficton)

Four Voices - Poetry from Zimbabwe
by Rowland Molony, David Wright,
John Eppel and Noel Brenell

Books of Zimbabwe, 1982
225 x 150 rnm, approx 120 pp.,contributed Foreword.
ISBN

THE quartet of poets represented here, coincidentally all schoolmasters, compose an engaging juxtaposition of life and style: Noel Brettell born in England but in Zimbabwe for over fifty years and now retired; David Wright and John Eppel both born and grown up in this country but now both emigrated, one to Australia and the other to Natal; and Rowland Molony a later arrival from Ireland. Their poetic styles and idiosyncrasies of expression also make a wide-ranging variety, all, however, with the craftsman's respect for form which makes verse and not prose.

Brettell is traditional though not without experimentation; Wright is experimental but with his feet firm on tradition. Molony has his own individual variations on rhyme, stanza and couplet. Eppel has the most contemporary idiom, confident, adventurous and provocative. Each draws largely from their Zimbabwean environment, although Brettell's reflections and philosophies on life will have been coloured by wider, deeper, and even traumatic, experiences.

The collection originated by chance, each poet having individually submitted work to the publisher about the same time, and happily so, as it is a pleasure that the voice of the poet should once again be heard in the land.

Each contributor's work appears together with individual subtitles: Frogs & Co. (Molony), The Strings of Earth (Wright), Rhodesian Lullaby (Eppel), and Recessional (Brettell).

Although Brettell has pointed out that "crabbed age and youth cannot live together", there is a pleasing harmony in this quartet which adds melodic counterpoint to so many of today's discords.

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