Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 64
ISBN: 9781854114129
Publication date: April 20, 2006
Price: £7.99
Out of stock
Winner of the 2006 Costa Poetry Award
Set in Patience’s Parlour, a small mud-walled bar in northern Nigeria, at a time of political unrest, Letter to Patience is a vividly atmospheric book-length poem divided into cantos.
The letter writer is in Britain, where he has returned with his Nigerian wife and children to nurse his dying father. He writes to Patience, the bar’s owner, who once lectured in politics but who gave up due to junta pressures.
The writer’s thoughts range from his childhood to the present: from African myths to personal histories, from political violence to its tragi-comic consequences. The poem is not only a biography, or an essay on post-colonialism, it is an epic portrayal of a beautiful and troubled country and of one man’s search for meaning in difficult times.
John Haynes
John Haynes has had a long career in education, and was a lecturer at the Ahmadu Bello University in the 70s and 80s, where he founded the literary journal, Saiwa. After returning to the UK in the 80s he has continued teaching, writing and publishing and his poems have appeared widely. His book length poem Letter to Patience, published by Seren, won the Costa Poetry Prize in 2006 and sections of the work have been published in London Magazine, Stand, Poetry Review, Ambit, Critical Quarterly and Poetry Wales. His second book length poem You (Seren) was shortlisted for the 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize. Haynes is the author of a number of books: on teaching, language theory, African Poetry and stories for African children, as well as two volumes of poetry. He has won prizes in the Arvon and National Poetry Competitions.
