Free Collected Poems by Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe
Collected Poems
    Chinua Achebe was born in Nigeria in 1930. He was raised in the large village of Ogidi, one of the first centers of Anglican missionary work in eastern Nigeria, and is a graduate of University College, Ibadan.
    His early career in radio ended abruptly in 1966, when he left his post as director of external broadcasting in Nigeria during the national upheaval that led to the Biafran War. He was appointed senior research fellow at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and began lecturing widely abroad.
    From 1972 to 1975, and again from 1987 to 1988, Mr. Achebe was professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and also for one year at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.
    Cited in the London
Sunday Times
as one of the “1,000 Makers of the Twentieth Century” for defining “a modern African literature that was truly African” and thereby making “a major contribution to world literature,” Chinua Achebe has published novels, short stories, essays, and children's books. His volume of poetry
Christmas in Biafra and Other Poems
, written during the Biafran War, was the joint winner of the first Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Of his novels,
Arrow of God
won the New Statesman–Jock Campbell Award, and
Anthills of the Savannah
was a finalist for the 1987 Booker Prize.
    Mr. Achebe has received numerous honors from around the world, including the Honorary Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Foreign Honorary Membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as more than thirty honorary doctorates from universities in England, Scotland, the United States, Canada, Nigeria, and South Africa. He is also the recipient of Nigeria's highest honor for intellectual achievement, the Nigerian National Order of Merit, and of Germany's Friedenpreis des Deutschen Buchhandels for 2002. In 2007, he won the Man Booker International Prize for Fiction.
    Mr. Achebe lives with his wife in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where they teach at Bard College. They have four children and three grandchildren.

Also by Chinua Achebe
    Anthills of the Savannah
    The Sacrificial Egg and Other Stories
    Things Fall Apart
    No Longer at Ease
    Chike and the River
    A Man of the People
    Arrow of God
    Girls at War and Other Stories
    Christmas in Biafra and Other Poems
    Beware Soul Brother
    Morning Yet on Creation Day
    The Trouble with Nigeria
    The Flute
    The Drum
    Hopes and Impediments
    How the Leopard Got His Claws
(with John Iroaganachi)
    Winds of Change: Modern Short Stories
    from Black Africa
(with others)
    African Short Stories
(editor, with C. L. Innes)
    Another Africa
(with Robert Lyons)
    Home and Exile



To the Memory of My Mother

In Lieu of a Preface: A Parable
    The Author had begun to worry about his own conduct. Perhaps he had not been fair to his poems. Yes, the same poetry that had surged from the depths to bring pain-soaked solace in the breach and darkness of civil war. Now he had stepped out alone into the light.
    Everyone knows, of course, that an author cannot possibly bring things to such a pass unaided. He had plenty of help from his then Publisher, who filled the role of primary culprit, leaving the Author with the guilt only of acquiescence and quietude. For, in truth, the Author had raised the matter of his poems now and again with the Publisher, aloof in his towers and battlements in distant London, unready for strange images and cadences; and his reply had always been a telegraphic non sequitur: We do very well with your novels, you know.
    In time the poems, like all children reared in hardship, grew tougher and wiser than their peers. They figured out that as offspring of a heedless parent they were fated to find their own way in the world. Their unguided wandering before long brought them face-to-face with a magician, Negative Capability,
the holy man of the forest, shaggy-haired powered for eternal replenishment
, alias Man Pass Man; and he blessed their