Tenderfoot

by Chris Beckett

Overview

A Tenderfoot is a novice, someone unaccustomed to hardship. Here, he is a white boy growing up in 1960s Ethiopia, a place he loves even as he learns his own privilege and foreignness. Later he hears rumours of a famine in the mountains and imagines a boy his own age living through it, surviving on angry couplets. Years after, he sees this famine-boy grown up and questions him. A sequel to Ethiopia Boy, Beckett's celebrated first Carcanet collection, Tenderfoot teems with praise-shouts for Asfaw the cook, for the boys living as minibus conductors or chewing-gum sellers, even for Tenderfoot's own stomach that hangs 'like a leopard in a thorn acacia tree'. Featuring storms and droughts, hunger and desire, donkeys who quote Samuel Johnson and a red bicycle that invites you on a poem tour of Addis Ababa, Tenderfoot takes in what is happening around but also inside the boy's mind and body - a human transformation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784109714
Publisher:	Carcanet Press, Limited
Publication date:	09/24/2020
Pages:	104
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Chris Beckett was born in London but grew up in Ethiopia in the 1960s. His first Carcanet collection, Ethiopia Boy (Carcanet/Oxford Poets, 2013), was described by Julian Stannard in Poetry Review as 'a series of dazzling vignettes... a love letter to the country and his childhood friend, Abebe'. His translations of contemporary Ethiopian poets have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, PN Review, The Missing Slate and Asymptote Journal. With Alemu Tebeje, he translated and edited Songs We Learn from Trees, the first ever anthology of Ethiopian Amharic poetry in English, published by Carcanet in May 2020. Sketches from the Poem Road (after Matsuo Basho's The Narrow Road to the Deep North), a collaboration with his partner, the Japanese painter and sculptor Isao Miura, was published by Hagi Press in 2015 and shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. He is a trustee of the Anglo-Ethiopian Society and the Poetry Society.

Table of Contents

Inglizawi negn! 1

Here comes a Donkey, Loaded with Beans

Sweetheart 5

Good bread 7

Asfaw's hunger 8

Ras Gugsa's kindness 9

The table 11

Pleasures of the feast 13

Elegy for a thunderstorm 14

When the backyard was a boy 16

When I was ten, I started watching men 17

The fig wasp 18

Bananas 19

In Gheralta 20

Becoming big 21

Praise shout for a stomach 22

Malnourished 23

I shave my soft hair 24

Qulul 25

To a tin shack behind the Lion's Den Hotel 27

Hungry, we 28

Small angry famine 29

Here comes a Donkey, Loaded with Figs

Outside the gates with Abebe 33

Here comes a Donkey, Loaded with Troubles

Tagesse's hunger poems 45

Here comes a Donkey, Loaded with Hope

Lib 61

To the teeming bookshops of Addis Ababa 62

The red bicycle 64

Three bushti go to the Mercato 67

Uncle! take me to a better place 69

The shop on my chest 70

To a weyala/minibus conductor 71

For the serval cats 72

Never a bad word about hyenas! 73

The young men say 74

When berberé attacks 75

Three pickpockets 76

Truth dog 77

Abel migrating 78

The day they murdered Assefa Maru 79

In the Lion Gardens 80

Chicken is the safest thing 82

Prayer to a saint of two religions 83

A song: Yehageré sheta 84

About the cows at Lake Langano 85

Amharic glossary 87

Notes 89

Acknowledgements 93