Ethiopia boy - Chris Beckett

Chris Beckett grew up in 1960s Ethiopia, a country he describes as a 'barefoot empire, home of black-maned lions...old priests decked out like butterflies and blazing young singers of Ethio-jazz'. Ethiopia Boy plunges the reader into praise poems that sing and boast and glory in the colours and textures of this extraordinary country. Here is a world of feasting on spicy kikwot and of famine sucking the water from rivers, of lion buses and a prayer child, where Earth sings greetings to the feet that walk on her.

Haunted by the memory of his friend Abebe, the cook's son, Beckett celebrates and laments a lost boyhood in poems of vivid immediacy.

COVER PAINTING Isao Miura, Crossing the Water (oil on canvas). Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.