{"id":401,"date":"2016-06-16T16:45:00","date_gmt":"2016-06-16T16:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mrmushava.wordpress.com\/2016\/06\/16\/eppel-and-muzanenhamo-stylish-and-cryptic\/"},"modified":"2026-10-25T14:50:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-25T14:50:08","slug":"style-wars-eppel-vs-muzanenhamo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blockspaceballads.com\/?p=401","title":{"rendered":"Style Wars \u2013 John Eppel vs. Togara Muzanenhamo"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n
\"http:\/\/ecx.images-amazon.com\/images\/I\/51BETgDvzYL._SX351_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Add caption<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n
When the muses refuse to smile on a poet, he runs out of inspiration but when a woman refuses to smile on him, a creative current carries him along.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

If not for this irony of deprivation, Dante, John Keats and Thomas Hardy may never have attained half their stature, and poetry would have been poorer for the equilibrium. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

John Eppel\u2019s impassioned reminisces for lost love in \u201cTextures\u201d make for a Zimbabwean version of the deprivation theory.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cTextures,\u201d the dual effort by highly regarded poets Togara Muzanenhamo and John Eppel is a league apart for its classical forms, musical cadences and cosmopolitan depth of field. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Zimbabwean poetry, often politically themed, thrives on immediacy, rejects classical forms, branding them synonymous with colonial tradition, utilises the canon of cultural decolonisation and is almost uniformly set to free verse. \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Muzanenhamo and Eppel\u2019s joint anthology is an apparent revolt against the post-colonial canon and fares exceptionally as a new aesthetic school.<\/p>\n

As if to confirm John Keats\u2019s wager: \u201cThe poetry of the earth is never dead,\u201d \u201cTextures\u201d won the National Arts Merit Award (Nama)\u2019s main literary accolade this year, the second consecutive time a poetry collection has landed the honour.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

With poetic thoroughbreds like David Mungoshi and Emmanuel Sigauke hunched over their keyboards this year, poetry may be bound for a third consecutive honour in the previously prose-dominated category.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Eppel\u2019s Bulawayo sequence is set to sonnets, odes, sestinas, villanelles and Romantic references, while Muzanenhamo employs modernist frame and a cosmopolitan depth of field.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Irony of history, loss of love, sense of mortality, appreciation of beauty, invocation of forgotten feats line and the debilitating trail of war line the thematic task-bar of the two poets for the most part. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The trouble with the anthology, however, is the poems are often densely pixilated and cryptic to a fault. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

While both poets ably set forth their scenes and provide the musical ambience, their ideas are sometimes buried in the aesthetics. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

On first reading, the meaning flies over your head, on second attempt the jigsaws seem to come together, third time you want to be sure you got it right, and so forth.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

If this is a flaw, though, then it has its side benefits. It makes the anthology more durable than the immediate ones which the reader stacks away after reading them once because there is nothing deeper.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

With this anthology, after gleaning the alluvial nuggets in the beautifully structured stanzas, you have a conviction that what you see is not all they is to know and you keep coming back for more.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The esoteric tendencies of Muzanenhamo and Eppel are perhaps the occupational hazard of being too style-conscious.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In an interview with Drew Shaw, then a lecturer at NUST, Eppel explains the paradox faced by lyric poets \u201cwhere they actually want to get rid of words, but the only way they can get rid of words is by using words. So there\u2019s this movement from sense to dominating to sound dominating.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

That could explain how the reader can resonate with the flow and the scenery but still not come away wiser for the exercise. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Sometimes, especially in Muzanenhamo\u2019s case, you feel that imagist economy could have worked neater but potency of diction eventually carries the day.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Texture is generally defined as the feel, appearance, or constancy of a surface or a substance but has different renderings in music, visual art and textiles. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBoth poets considered musical metaphors for the title of this collection but chose the more visual name \u2018Textures\u2019, which is appropriate, Eppel said, \u2018because the word text<\/i> is from the Latin texere<\/i>, which basically means to weave hence the word textile<\/i>\u2026 and the idea of the woof and the warp is appropriate for poets who are interweaving their texts in one book,\u2019\u201d Shaw relates.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Some of Eppel\u2019s poems are double-layered where you have a visual sequence preceding a personal emotion. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

And because \u201cnone throws away the apple for the core,\u201d as John Bunyan said, each layer is meticulously attended sensory stimuli retaining appeal to the point of emotional disclosure. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The opening poem, for example, sets out a suburban setting, lonely but for the routine ambience of nature, in the first stanza. The second stanza, switched to another rhyme scheme, seems to recall lost love and the departed companion is imagined \u201csmiling at him the way you smiled at me.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOnly Jacarandas\u201d seems to give a nod to the resilience of natural beauty; whereas displays are set for other forms to shine, \u201cjacarandas\/ can take their reflection\/ from the dull sky of tarmac.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The elderly poet is at it again in his sonnet sequence, \u201cThe Hillside Dams in Bulawayo,\u201d reminiscing about lost love with more \u201cyou sections.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

One recalls Hardy (I gather some place that he is Eppel\u2019s favourite poet) in his futile quest for Emma and the beautiful poetry occasioned, among listless sceneries, by his recollections of the \u201cwoman much-missed.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The third entry in \u201cFour Villanelles\u201d and third poem, \u201cLooking for You,\u201d also seems to recall his Beatrice, Emma or Fanny, although the poet\u2019s esoteric tendency does not allow for solid grounds. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The first villanelle on man\u2019s conquest of woman has a political drift. \u201cDavids are Goliaths in waiting\/ the corrupting effect of power\/ it\u2019s a maxim worth restating\u201d the poet observes. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIn Beauty is Truth, Truth Death,\u201d the poet reflects of the brevity of beauty, its subservience to the cycle of seasons, and in that thread, invokes a sense of mortality. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAppropriating the Land,\u201d a colonial reconstruction satirises a minority dispensation closer to nature than to the people, hence \u201cbossy warnings\/ with words like \u2018forbidden\u2019 \/ and \u2018only\u2026\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Suburban Eppel only ever gets out of Bulawayo with the poem \u201cDorothy Recollects,\u201d a reconstruction of the Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

By contrast, young Muzanenhamo is cosmopolitan, globalist and modernist. His settings are as varied as USA, UK, Norway, France, Peru, Mozambique, Somalia and Zimbabwe, almost as an afterthought. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Muzanenhamo articulates the universality of human experience and the transcendence of literature, a view also espoused by Dambudzo Marechera and Wole Soyinka. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt fascinates how similar how similar people are,\u201d Muzanenhamo says in an interview with Dr Shaw. \u201cYou go to any country and find that we all possess the same emotions; we speak different languages, and there\u2019s a different landscape, but the baseline of all humanity strums at the same rhythm.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cGondershe,\u201d a poem about a child soldier surrounded by his dead comrades on a Somalian beach, himself waiting to die is a forceful indictment on war.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c\u201dHaving never fired a gun before, he held the rifle\/ as though the weapon were a dying child about to say something\/ only they could share\u2026 Come dawn there would be no escape\/ He would die. Even the sea would burn,\u201d Muzanenhamo relates.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cZvita,\u201d an anatomy of death, is singularly unsettling. Whereas December is the cropping season, synonymous with new life, Muzanenhamo appropriates the last month as a symbol of the end of life. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In \u201cMercantile Rain,\u201d Muzanenhamo reconstructs the vagaries of war. Through a war that came with \u201cloud with every death, dark with every monstrous fear,\u201d a surviving soldier will never get over the loss his wife and family.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Muzanenhamo occasionally comes across as gross, sometimes too enigmatic. But he has already staked his claim as one of the most sophisticated Zimbabwean poets.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Add caption When the muses refuse to smile on a poet, he runs out of inspiration but when a woman refuses to smile on him, a creative current carries him along. If not for this irony of deprivation, Dante, John Keats and Thomas Hardy may never have attained half their stature, and poetry would have been poorer for the equilibrium. John Eppel\u2019s impassioned reminisces for lost love in \u201cTextures\u201d make for a Zimbabwean version of the deprivation theory. \u201cTextures,\u201d the dual effort by highly regarded poets Togara Muzanenhamo and John Eppel is a league apart for its classical forms, musical cadences and cosmopolitan depth of field. Zimbabwean poetry, often politically themed, thrives on immediacy, rejects classical forms, branding them synonymous with colonial tradition, utilises the canon of cultural decolonisation and is almost uniformly set to free verse. \u00a0 Muzanenhamo and Eppel\u2019s joint anthology is an apparent revolt against the post-colonial canon and fares exceptionally as a new aesthetic school. As if to confirm John Keats\u2019s wager: \u201cThe poetry of the earth is never dead,\u201d \u201cTextures\u201d won the National Arts Merit Award (Nama)\u2019s main literary accolade this year, the second consecutive time a poetry collection has landed the honour. With poetic thoroughbreds like David Mungoshi and Emmanuel Sigauke hunched over their keyboards this year, poetry may be bound for a third consecutive honour in the previously prose-dominated category. Eppel\u2019s Bulawayo sequence is set to sonnets, odes, sestinas, villanelles and Romantic references, while Muzanenhamo employs modernist frame and a cosmopolitan depth of field. Irony of history, loss of love, sense of mortality, appreciation of beauty, invocation of forgotten feats line and the debilitating trail of war line the thematic task-bar of the two poets for the most part. The trouble with the anthology, however, is the poems are often densely pixilated and cryptic to a fault. While both poets ably set forth their scenes and provide the musical ambience, their ideas are sometimes buried in the aesthetics. On first reading, the meaning flies over your head, on second attempt the jigsaws seem to come together, third time you want to be sure you got it right, and so forth. If this is a flaw, though, then it has its side benefits. It makes the anthology more durable than the immediate ones which the reader stacks away after reading them once because there is nothing deeper. With this anthology, after gleaning the alluvial nuggets in the beautifully structured stanzas, you have a conviction that what you see is not all they is to know and you keep coming back for more. The esoteric tendencies of Muzanenhamo and Eppel are perhaps the occupational hazard of being too style-conscious. In an interview with Drew Shaw, then a lecturer at NUST, Eppel explains the paradox faced by lyric poets \u201cwhere they actually want to get rid of words, but the only way they can get rid of words is by using words. So there\u2019s this movement from sense to dominating to sound dominating.\u201d That could explain how the reader can resonate with the flow and the scenery but still not come away wiser for the exercise. Sometimes, especially in Muzanenhamo\u2019s case, you feel that imagist economy could have worked neater but potency of diction eventually carries the day. Texture is generally defined as the feel, appearance, or constancy of a surface or a substance but has different renderings in music, visual art and textiles. \u201cBoth poets considered musical metaphors for the title of this collection but chose the more visual name \u2018Textures\u2019, which is appropriate, Eppel said, \u2018because the word text is from the Latin texere, which basically means to weave hence the word textile\u2026 and the idea of the woof and the warp is appropriate for poets who are interweaving their texts in one book,\u2019\u201d Shaw relates. Some of Eppel\u2019s poems are double-layered where you have a visual sequence preceding a personal emotion. And because \u201cnone throws away the apple for the core,\u201d as John Bunyan said, each layer is meticulously attended sensory stimuli retaining appeal to the point of emotional disclosure. The opening poem, for example, sets out a suburban setting, lonely but for the routine ambience of nature, in the first stanza. The second stanza, switched to another rhyme scheme, seems to recall lost love and the departed companion is imagined \u201csmiling at him the way you smiled at me.\u201d \u201cOnly Jacarandas\u201d seems to give a nod to the resilience of natural beauty; whereas displays are set for other forms to shine, \u201cjacarandas\/ can take their reflection\/ from the dull sky of tarmac.\u201d The elderly poet is at it again in his sonnet sequence, \u201cThe Hillside Dams in Bulawayo,\u201d reminiscing about lost love with more \u201cyou sections.\u201d One recalls Hardy (I gather some place that he is Eppel\u2019s favourite poet) in his futile quest for Emma and the beautiful poetry occasioned, among listless sceneries, by his recollections of the \u201cwoman much-missed.\u201d The third entry in \u201cFour Villanelles\u201d and third poem, \u201cLooking for You,\u201d also seems to recall his Beatrice, Emma or Fanny, although the poet\u2019s esoteric tendency does not allow for solid grounds. The first villanelle on man\u2019s conquest of woman has a political drift. \u201cDavids are Goliaths in waiting\/ the corrupting effect of power\/ it\u2019s a maxim worth restating\u201d the poet observes. \u201cIn Beauty is Truth, Truth Death,\u201d the poet reflects of the brevity of beauty, its subservience to the cycle of seasons, and in that thread, invokes a sense of mortality. \u201cAppropriating the Land,\u201d a colonial reconstruction satirises a minority dispensation closer to nature than to the people, hence \u201cbossy warnings\/ with words like \u2018forbidden\u2019 \/ and \u2018only\u2026\u2019\u201d Suburban Eppel only ever gets out of Bulawayo with the poem \u201cDorothy Recollects,\u201d a reconstruction of the Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge. By contrast, young Muzanenhamo is cosmopolitan, globalist and modernist. His settings are as varied as USA, UK, Norway, France, Peru, Mozambique, Somalia and Zimbabwe, almost as an afterthought. Muzanenhamo articulates the universality of human experience and the transcendence<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"yoast_head":"\nStyle Wars \u2013 John Eppel vs. Togara Muzanenhamo | Blockspace<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blockspaceballads.com\/?p=401\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Style Wars \u2013 John Eppel vs. Togara Muzanenhamo | Blockspace\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Add caption When the muses refuse to smile on a poet, he runs out of inspiration but when a woman refuses to smile on him, a creative current carries him along. If not for this irony of deprivation, Dante, John Keats and Thomas Hardy may never have attained half their stature, and poetry would have been poorer for the equilibrium. John Eppel\u2019s impassioned reminisces for lost love in \u201cTextures\u201d make for a Zimbabwean version of the deprivation theory. \u201cTextures,\u201d the dual effort by highly regarded poets Togara Muzanenhamo and John Eppel is a league apart for its classical forms, musical cadences and cosmopolitan depth of field. Zimbabwean poetry, often politically themed, thrives on immediacy, rejects classical forms, branding them synonymous with colonial tradition, utilises the canon of cultural decolonisation and is almost uniformly set to free verse. \u00a0 Muzanenhamo and Eppel\u2019s joint anthology is an apparent revolt against the post-colonial canon and fares exceptionally as a new aesthetic school. As if to confirm John Keats\u2019s wager: \u201cThe poetry of the earth is never dead,\u201d \u201cTextures\u201d won the National Arts Merit Award (Nama)\u2019s main literary accolade this year, the second consecutive time a poetry collection has landed the honour. With poetic thoroughbreds like David Mungoshi and Emmanuel Sigauke hunched over their keyboards this year, poetry may be bound for a third consecutive honour in the previously prose-dominated category. Eppel\u2019s Bulawayo sequence is set to sonnets, odes, sestinas, villanelles and Romantic references, while Muzanenhamo employs modernist frame and a cosmopolitan depth of field. Irony of history, loss of love, sense of mortality, appreciation of beauty, invocation of forgotten feats line and the debilitating trail of war line the thematic task-bar of the two poets for the most part. The trouble with the anthology, however, is the poems are often densely pixilated and cryptic to a fault. While both poets ably set forth their scenes and provide the musical ambience, their ideas are sometimes buried in the aesthetics. On first reading, the meaning flies over your head, on second attempt the jigsaws seem to come together, third time you want to be sure you got it right, and so forth. If this is a flaw, though, then it has its side benefits. It makes the anthology more durable than the immediate ones which the reader stacks away after reading them once because there is nothing deeper. With this anthology, after gleaning the alluvial nuggets in the beautifully structured stanzas, you have a conviction that what you see is not all they is to know and you keep coming back for more. The esoteric tendencies of Muzanenhamo and Eppel are perhaps the occupational hazard of being too style-conscious. In an interview with Drew Shaw, then a lecturer at NUST, Eppel explains the paradox faced by lyric poets \u201cwhere they actually want to get rid of words, but the only way they can get rid of words is by using words. So there\u2019s this movement from sense to dominating to sound dominating.\u201d That could explain how the reader can resonate with the flow and the scenery but still not come away wiser for the exercise. Sometimes, especially in Muzanenhamo\u2019s case, you feel that imagist economy could have worked neater but potency of diction eventually carries the day. Texture is generally defined as the feel, appearance, or constancy of a surface or a substance but has different renderings in music, visual art and textiles. \u201cBoth poets considered musical metaphors for the title of this collection but chose the more visual name \u2018Textures\u2019, which is appropriate, Eppel said, \u2018because the word text is from the Latin texere, which basically means to weave hence the word textile\u2026 and the idea of the woof and the warp is appropriate for poets who are interweaving their texts in one book,\u2019\u201d Shaw relates. Some of Eppel\u2019s poems are double-layered where you have a visual sequence preceding a personal emotion. And because \u201cnone throws away the apple for the core,\u201d as John Bunyan said, each layer is meticulously attended sensory stimuli retaining appeal to the point of emotional disclosure. The opening poem, for example, sets out a suburban setting, lonely but for the routine ambience of nature, in the first stanza. The second stanza, switched to another rhyme scheme, seems to recall lost love and the departed companion is imagined \u201csmiling at him the way you smiled at me.\u201d \u201cOnly Jacarandas\u201d seems to give a nod to the resilience of natural beauty; whereas displays are set for other forms to shine, \u201cjacarandas\/ can take their reflection\/ from the dull sky of tarmac.\u201d The elderly poet is at it again in his sonnet sequence, \u201cThe Hillside Dams in Bulawayo,\u201d reminiscing about lost love with more \u201cyou sections.\u201d One recalls Hardy (I gather some place that he is Eppel\u2019s favourite poet) in his futile quest for Emma and the beautiful poetry occasioned, among listless sceneries, by his recollections of the \u201cwoman much-missed.\u201d The third entry in \u201cFour Villanelles\u201d and third poem, \u201cLooking for You,\u201d also seems to recall his Beatrice, Emma or Fanny, although the poet\u2019s esoteric tendency does not allow for solid grounds. The first villanelle on man\u2019s conquest of woman has a political drift. \u201cDavids are Goliaths in waiting\/ the corrupting effect of power\/ it\u2019s a maxim worth restating\u201d the poet observes. \u201cIn Beauty is Truth, Truth Death,\u201d the poet reflects of the brevity of beauty, its subservience to the cycle of seasons, and in that thread, invokes a sense of mortality. \u201cAppropriating the Land,\u201d a colonial reconstruction satirises a minority dispensation closer to nature than to the people, hence \u201cbossy warnings\/ with words like \u2018forbidden\u2019 \/ and \u2018only\u2026\u2019\u201d Suburban Eppel only ever gets out of Bulawayo with the poem \u201cDorothy Recollects,\u201d a reconstruction of the Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge. By contrast, young Muzanenhamo is cosmopolitan, globalist and modernist. His settings are as varied as USA, UK, Norway, France, Peru, Mozambique, Somalia and Zimbabwe, almost as an afterthought. Muzanenhamo articulates the universality of human experience and the transcendence\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/blockspaceballads.com\/?p=401\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Blockspace\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2016-06-16T16:45:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2026-10-25T14:50:08+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/ecx.images-amazon.com\/images\/I\/51BETgDvzYL._SX351_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"hardsouth\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"hardsouth\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" 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\/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Style Wars \u2013 John Eppel vs. Togara Muzanenhamo | Blockspace","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/blockspaceballads.com\/?p=401","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Style Wars \u2013 John Eppel vs. Togara Muzanenhamo | Blockspace","og_description":"Add caption When the muses refuse to smile on a poet, he runs out of inspiration but when a woman refuses to smile on him, a creative current carries him along. If not for this irony of deprivation, Dante, John Keats and Thomas Hardy may never have attained half their stature, and poetry would have been poorer for the equilibrium. John Eppel\u2019s impassioned reminisces for lost love in \u201cTextures\u201d make for a Zimbabwean version of the deprivation theory. \u201cTextures,\u201d the dual effort by highly regarded poets Togara Muzanenhamo and John Eppel is a league apart for its classical forms, musical cadences and cosmopolitan depth of field. Zimbabwean poetry, often politically themed, thrives on immediacy, rejects classical forms, branding them synonymous with colonial tradition, utilises the canon of cultural decolonisation and is almost uniformly set to free verse. \u00a0 Muzanenhamo and Eppel\u2019s joint anthology is an apparent revolt against the post-colonial canon and fares exceptionally as a new aesthetic school. As if to confirm John Keats\u2019s wager: \u201cThe poetry of the earth is never dead,\u201d \u201cTextures\u201d won the National Arts Merit Award (Nama)\u2019s main literary accolade this year, the second consecutive time a poetry collection has landed the honour. With poetic thoroughbreds like David Mungoshi and Emmanuel Sigauke hunched over their keyboards this year, poetry may be bound for a third consecutive honour in the previously prose-dominated category. Eppel\u2019s Bulawayo sequence is set to sonnets, odes, sestinas, villanelles and Romantic references, while Muzanenhamo employs modernist frame and a cosmopolitan depth of field. Irony of history, loss of love, sense of mortality, appreciation of beauty, invocation of forgotten feats line and the debilitating trail of war line the thematic task-bar of the two poets for the most part. The trouble with the anthology, however, is the poems are often densely pixilated and cryptic to a fault. While both poets ably set forth their scenes and provide the musical ambience, their ideas are sometimes buried in the aesthetics. On first reading, the meaning flies over your head, on second attempt the jigsaws seem to come together, third time you want to be sure you got it right, and so forth. If this is a flaw, though, then it has its side benefits. It makes the anthology more durable than the immediate ones which the reader stacks away after reading them once because there is nothing deeper. With this anthology, after gleaning the alluvial nuggets in the beautifully structured stanzas, you have a conviction that what you see is not all they is to know and you keep coming back for more. The esoteric tendencies of Muzanenhamo and Eppel are perhaps the occupational hazard of being too style-conscious. In an interview with Drew Shaw, then a lecturer at NUST, Eppel explains the paradox faced by lyric poets \u201cwhere they actually want to get rid of words, but the only way they can get rid of words is by using words. So there\u2019s this movement from sense to dominating to sound dominating.\u201d That could explain how the reader can resonate with the flow and the scenery but still not come away wiser for the exercise. Sometimes, especially in Muzanenhamo\u2019s case, you feel that imagist economy could have worked neater but potency of diction eventually carries the day. Texture is generally defined as the feel, appearance, or constancy of a surface or a substance but has different renderings in music, visual art and textiles. \u201cBoth poets considered musical metaphors for the title of this collection but chose the more visual name \u2018Textures\u2019, which is appropriate, Eppel said, \u2018because the word text is from the Latin texere, which basically means to weave hence the word textile\u2026 and the idea of the woof and the warp is appropriate for poets who are interweaving their texts in one book,\u2019\u201d Shaw relates. Some of Eppel\u2019s poems are double-layered where you have a visual sequence preceding a personal emotion. And because \u201cnone throws away the apple for the core,\u201d as John Bunyan said, each layer is meticulously attended sensory stimuli retaining appeal to the point of emotional disclosure. The opening poem, for example, sets out a suburban setting, lonely but for the routine ambience of nature, in the first stanza. The second stanza, switched to another rhyme scheme, seems to recall lost love and the departed companion is imagined \u201csmiling at him the way you smiled at me.\u201d \u201cOnly Jacarandas\u201d seems to give a nod to the resilience of natural beauty; whereas displays are set for other forms to shine, \u201cjacarandas\/ can take their reflection\/ from the dull sky of tarmac.\u201d The elderly poet is at it again in his sonnet sequence, \u201cThe Hillside Dams in Bulawayo,\u201d reminiscing about lost love with more \u201cyou sections.\u201d One recalls Hardy (I gather some place that he is Eppel\u2019s favourite poet) in his futile quest for Emma and the beautiful poetry occasioned, among listless sceneries, by his recollections of the \u201cwoman much-missed.\u201d The third entry in \u201cFour Villanelles\u201d and third poem, \u201cLooking for You,\u201d also seems to recall his Beatrice, Emma or Fanny, although the poet\u2019s esoteric tendency does not allow for solid grounds. The first villanelle on man\u2019s conquest of woman has a political drift. \u201cDavids are Goliaths in waiting\/ the corrupting effect of power\/ it\u2019s a maxim worth restating\u201d the poet observes. \u201cIn Beauty is Truth, Truth Death,\u201d the poet reflects of the brevity of beauty, its subservience to the cycle of seasons, and in that thread, invokes a sense of mortality. \u201cAppropriating the Land,\u201d a colonial reconstruction satirises a minority dispensation closer to nature than to the people, hence \u201cbossy warnings\/ with words like \u2018forbidden\u2019 \/ and \u2018only\u2026\u2019\u201d Suburban Eppel only ever gets out of Bulawayo with the poem \u201cDorothy Recollects,\u201d a reconstruction of the Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge. By contrast, young Muzanenhamo is cosmopolitan, globalist and modernist. His settings are as varied as USA, UK, Norway, France, Peru, Mozambique, Somalia and Zimbabwe, almost as an afterthought. Muzanenhamo articulates the universality of human experience and the transcendence","og_url":"https:\/\/blockspaceballads.com\/?p=401","og_site_name":"Blockspace","article_published_time":"2016-06-16T16:45:00+00:00","article_modified_time":"2026-10-25T14:50:08+00:00","og_image":[{"url":"http:\/\/ecx.images-amazon.com\/images\/I\/51BETgDvzYL._SX351_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg","type":"","width":"","height":""}],"author":"hardsouth","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"hardsouth","Est. reading time":"6 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/blockspaceballads.com\/?p=401#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/blockspaceballads.com\/?p=401"},"author":{"name":"hardsouth","@id":"https:\/\/blockspaceballads.com\/#\/schema\/person\/a336a678f28eacb341ce63c6b84b17d0"},"headline":"Style Wars \u2013 John Eppel vs. Togara 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