3 January 2024: ‘Now I Sing: 50 poems to celebrate 50 years’ by Loraine Masiya Mponela
In the next of our serious of posts about how we can open hearts through the arts, we join Loraine Masiya Mponela in celebrating the publication of her second book of poems: ‘Now I Sing: 50 poems to celebrate 50 years’
The book is available here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CRDW5SJZ
Painful pitfalls and pinnacle triumphs.Now I Sing by Loraine Masiya Mponela is both a lamentation and a celebration, offering 50 poems for the 50 years she has lived. This collection honours her people’s ancient wisdom while imagining her future. Reflecting on individual and collective journeys, it is a book about courage, fear, desperation and excellence.
“Loraine shares deeply personal events of her life, one text at a time, with flamboyant elegance. Even though some of her poems narrate episodes of grief, she manages to captivate the essence of humanity in those moments. Shifting through opposing themes of calmness and anxiety, young and old, hope and fear, family and isolation, there is a thread of survival and celebration that weaves through the whole arc. These poems take-off from where her inaugural anthology, I Was Not Born a Sad Poet, left.” Allan Njanji, Researcher in Forced Migration and Refugee Studies‘