Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon
£25.00
About the author
Shadrach A. Ambanasom was born in Ngie Sub-Division in the North-West Region of Cameroon. He holds the following academic diplomas: CAPCEG, Modern Letters (University of Yaounde 1); BA (Hons) English (University of London); M.Ed; MA and PhD (Ohio University). He is an initiated member of the American KAPPA DELTA PI, an honour society which encourages high professional, intellectual and personal standards and recognizes outstanding contributions to education. Presently he is Associate Professor and Head of the English Department at E.N.S. Annexe Bambili, University of Yaounde 1. His publications include The Radical Romantics: An Introduction (2001), Education of the Deprived: A Study of four Cameroonian Playwrights (2003), The Dregs of Humanity (2005), Homage and Courtship: Romantic Stirrings of a Young Man (2007), Son of the Native Soil (2009) and numerous articles in national and international scientific journals.
Review
“Here is a collection of sixty-two beautifully crafted poems on some of
the deepest of human emotions. They celebrate love, constancy, beauty,
marriage, birth and death; in the poems are hailed intellectual labour,
leadership and duty. Occasionally, the poet depicts the states of his
mind against the backdrop of nature, interfusing description, memory
and meditation in a manner essentially romantic. The best in
Ambanasom’s poetry is matter and manner combined. The striking force of
the poems lies in the intriguing relationship between romanticism and
romance. Ambanasom’s romanticism is concerned with the concept of
nature as a universal being or a cosmic entity, nostalgia, the attempt
to link his childhood with the present and the future, and the response
to nature at different levels of his development. The poet also
demonstrates a penchant for rural subject matter, places and people. In
the poet of romance there is a more direct expression of basic human
emotions, in particular of love that is enchanting, possessing,
seductive, and alluring. We find in the poems, love that is reciprocal
and imbued with constancy and understanding.”
John Nkemngong Nkengasong, Writer and Critic, University of Yaoundé 1
“Ambanasom inserts the appropriate word for the appropriate emotion, using images to clothe his thought, images assembled from things actually seen and intimately known. His poetry achieves music and rhythm through diction, alliteration, repetition, assonance and the rhythmic cadence of the structure of some of the poems. This, to my mind, constitutes its forte.”
Eunice Ngongkum, Senior Lecturer , Department of African Literature, University of Yaoundé 1