The World Salad

I am delighted to introduce to you this special chapbook featuring poems from The Poetry Translation Centre, brought to you through the dedication and hard work of the remarkable Saraba team. The guiding principle of the PTC is a radical poetic internationalism and so we were thrilled when Adebiyi Olusolape contacted us in April 2011 to tell us of Saraba’s desire to draw your... Read More

Giovanni’s New Room

Download Editor’s Note Our aesthetics are still based, in part, on prosody and vestigial criteria that should apply only to orature. Saraba continues in this chapbook, it’s fourth, to contrast the traditional forms with the newer species emerging from the evolution of the written word. Aderemi’s sonnet, “First Child,” free of the meretricious rhyme scheme and... Read More

The Economy of Sound

(Introduction to THE ECONOMY OF SOUND, Saraba’s first poetry chapbook by Tade Ipadeola) That poetry reinvents itself, that it finds a home in every succeeding generation of humanity, that it endures – is a function of a deep, and spare, economy. In the current edition of Saraba, I find this to be true. The very form this publication takes is virtual. No trees were... Read More

Of Rhythm and Reason

NIRAN OKEWOLE (Introduction to OF RHYTHM AND REASON, Saraba’s second chapbook) Among the dusty shelves of the University of Ibadan library, I stumbled on a book which pretty much revolutionised the way I thought about poetry. It was a book of essays by Ezra Pound. In it I came across for the first time that unrivalled definition of what an image is – ‘an intellectual... Read More

Voices on the Four Winds

(Introduction to VOICES ON THE 4 WINDS, Saraba’s third (intercontinental) chapbook, by JUMOKE VERISSIMO) The mathematical precision of poems per poet in this third edition of Saraba’s chapbook gives it the character of the wind―speed and direction. There are eighteen poems, three each, from six poets across the globe. The poets in this edition move us into their world,... Read More