Barbed Forest draws from the socio-political character of society—specific societies sometimes. It navigates its way from the political to the familial and ultimately personal concerns of humankind before projecting the positive “humanist vision” of which the poet cum freedom songster dreams. Reviews. “This collection is the poet’s profound meditation on the construction of the few by the many-one, the running crowds and the lion who sets the law, and the evocation of Blake's mythology is wonderfully grounded in a strong personal and political myth that the reader can see being played out in this suite of "Scavenger" poems. No lamb lying down for these poems: a rich vein of poetry lies in wait for the reader here as the poems spray word bullets at the prevailing doxa or political and social imagination that continues to plague nations across the world. The poems herein strike a strong chord with me, and masterfully too.” Beornn McCarthy, Literary Studies, University of Melbourne/Deakin University “An artistic take on the colonial forces of repression and regression akin to those in La République du Cameroun of today, Barbed Forest evokes the forceful occupation and caging in of the Forest and Grassfields Regions of British Southern Cameroons. These are acerbic pieces authoritatively delivered such that they name and shame the culprits.” Emmanuel Fru Doh, Century College, Minnesota
In this volume Bill F. Ndi portrays life, death, and dying as one great adventure through which one would explore the limitless bounds of Life. At its best, the collection echoes the words of anthropologist Francis B. Nyamnjoh when he underlines that, “one is only dead to particular context as a way of making oneself alive to prospective new contexts.” Ndi in this collection invites the reader to learn the art of living through the art of dying and accepting death.
A literary monument erected by a poet for poets with a vision for poetry as a special annunciation and the poet as a seer, spokesperson, recorder, analyst, adjudicator and advocate with poetic vision and poetic understanding. Bill Ndi, the poet has the rare gift of slipping into the self and psyche of his society to empty the dark depths where the treasures of burden and sadness are hidden. He empties and exposes them to the world to see how even personal repression of feelings by far outweighs those imposed throughout History by tyrants. It is above all, his greatest task of filling these depths with the joys and expectations of the society. This objective stance by the poet places him above the fanatic whose subjectivity pushes the world adrift and makes of the poet a universal man of peace.
Bill NDI s Toil and Delivery can be as playful and loaded as the clues in a cryptic crossword puzzle, which is to say that they are marked by a strange, energetic hybridity. They occupy a dynamic space between nursery rhyme and visionary Romantic verse, between the colloquial And The archaic, between postmodernity and anachronism. They are local and global, political and personal, Western and non-Western. With experiences traversing both Africa And The West, Bill F. NDI is one of those poets who gives meaning To The word globalisation. He embraces poetry as a material act in a troubled world, with poetry s power conveyed with typical irony.
Bill NDI's Bleeding Red: Cameroon in Black and White is another masterpiece from a poet with a deeply political vision. This collection of poems with Cameroon as the particular focal point is a paragon of socio-political and cultural alertness in verse that will get every reader on their toes. Bill NDI's world is fraught with topsy-turvydom. It is a world darkened by experience and a keen sense of the wrongs plaguing his beloved country. He points out, without preaching, where it all went wrong, how it can, or what it will take to, be redeemed. The acerbity of Bill NDI's criticism runs from the very first poem of the collection 'Anthem for Essingang' through "The Promise" to the very last one "Papa Ngando Yi Mimba for Camelun". What a clime characterised by a ìclan of mbokos, clan of banditsî! It is just natural that as they perpetrate ìdeath and sadnessî in his beloved fatherland, nothing but ìdisgraceî, ìgreat shameî, and ìrepudiationî awaits them for evermore.
In K'cracy, Trees in the Storm and Other Poems, Bill Ndi vociferously bemoans the fate of a world in which the good and the evil are intimate bedfellows; a world wherein miscreants proceed with nauseating impunity to trample on innocence. The poet, a widely traveled scholar in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, currently resides in Australia where he is hailed as an Ambassador of the Peace. Informed by his experience as a child of the world - being at home away from home and thinking of home, Bill Ndi serves the reader with a delicious platter of poetic maze which to him is synonymous to the political maze he has known around the world.
Sing Love 101 a collection of 101 love poems in which this wordsmith worth his words brings together the good, the bad and the ugly of human love experiences. The poems are glossed with the simplicity of a sweet gentle breeze that caresses the reader's heart like that blowing across his childhood rice fields in the summer. The poet highlights 'Love' as 'the Dream' none should let die.
The fiery passion and epigrammatic terseness with which Loretta Burns re-enacts her experiences and observations as an African American woman in contemporary America reveal her as a poet of life who transcends the labels African American, feminist, and/or womanist. Her poetry captures moments and scenes of living that echo her impressions and intuitions of a world trapped between appearance and reality, illusion and disillusion, expectation and realization, the material and the spiritual. Through her deceptive simplicity of diction, she explores the nooks and crannies of her psyche as well as her societyís. It is a poetry written from the depths of the heart that calls attention to the mystery and sacredness of the everyday. It therefore comes as no surprise that Loretta Burns and Bill F. Ndi, the Cameroonian-born poet with a fierce drive for global peace and the oneness of humanity, should collaborate on a collection of poems. With vibrancy and a sense of urgency, their lines evoke humanityís perpetual struggle for freedom and its search for meaning.
Semantically multi layered collection of poems built on clever word play that encourages readers to contemplate the nature of poetry and the qualities that underlie a poet's resilience as he navigates hardships in his life and creative journeys. Waves of Anger is in a word an exploration or the paradoxical nature of the poet's and poetic resilience. Throughout the collection, the inherent nature of the poet's softness in tone and style is pitched as a desirable quality countering the expected toughness and roughness of anger. The poet's leitmotif in this collection is compelling and irresistible in nature.
Bill F. Ndi’s Sacred Songs is a collection of 95 sonnets deeply rooted in the tradition of spiritual testimony of faith. The personae in the poems are a creed of believers who are never far away from their God to whom be all glory. These poems are all in praise of the works of the Almighty God in the life of all. Bill F. Ndi in his characteristic simplicity and songlike style stays close to his humanist vision, and socio-political anguish, which he skillfully weaves in spirituality. Tacitly assuming responsibility for his foibles as human, the poet forfeits every other hard-to-overcome obstacle of divine nature, into the hands of God Almighty. This collection embraces, in a refreshing way, biblical precepts of freedom as well as contemporary social, economic, political, and even philosophical notions of freedom and oppression. This is a pleasurable collection to read in its entirety; it is a man’s sobering reflection on and of the divine.
So much ink has already been spilled on the issues of climate change. In this collection, Bill F. Ndi blends environmental sciences with poetic art in a bit to make the strange ordinary and the ordinary strangely extraordinary. The poems challenge the denialists in desperate need for some material to chew on. The poems in this collection, written with both provocativeness and compassion, are about the wondrous working of nature. This brilliant work of poetic art—crafted with poignancy and beauty—uses a fixed form, for the most part, as if to say Nature’s splendor should not be meddled with in the same way man has and still does. This collection is an exquisite, an incredible as well as a great and a rare gift from the plume of Bill F. Ndi.
Bill F. Ndi, poet, playwright, storyteller, literary critic, translator, historian of ideas and mentalities and academic is household name in Anglophone Cameroonian poetry. He has held teaching positions in several universities in Australia, France, and elsewhere. He now teaches at Tuskegee University, Tuskegee Alabama, USA. He has authored numerous (poetry, drama, scholarly works on early Quakerism as well as translations of early Quaker writings) publications in both the English and French languages. "Epigrams is a compendium of sagacious aphorisms in which Bill F. Ndi has dared to stand on the shoulders of the Muses to see in his own mind's eye; to decipher the indicible. The poet's locus is the all-too-human foible but the bull's eye is the optical illusion engendered by the misreading of life's chessboard. He chides, lambastes and laughs under his sleeve, all in an effort to return to sanity a world gone berserk." Peter Wuteh Vakunta, Department of Defense Language Institute, Presidio of Monterey, USA
Peace Mongers is much more than a collection or book of poems. It is the concretization of an indefatigable crusade for peace through lyricism that equally reads much more as a manifesto. The words, herein strung, dignify the victims of gratuitous violence, be it political, social, economic, or cultural. On the same scale the collection comes across as a virulent vilification of the perpetrators of acts of violence which to the poet is never justified. In short, Peace Monger is an ingenious and gleeful dissection of violence that plague humanity more than ever before and especially Ambazonia/Southern Cameroons.
L’autobiographie spirituelle de Stirredge est une trésorerie de sagesse spirituelle qui dépeint tout ce qu'il faut pour être un fidèle serviteur du Seigneur Jésus Christ et comment la puissance de Dieu opère pour ériger, dresser et soutenir une âme ordinaire pour mener une vie d’extraordinaire fidélité. Il s’agit ici de l’intime conviction de Stirredge et de tous les Quakers. La traduction de cet ouvrage clé est la bienvenue car, cet il mérite plus d’attention que l’on ne lui aurait accordée jusqu’à nos jours. Elizabeth Stirredge's spiritual autobiography is a treasury of spiritual wisdom which paints all that which is needed to be a faithful servant of the Lord Jesus Christ and how God in His might works, transforms, and supports an ordinary soul to lead the life of extraordinary faithfulness. The text highlights Stirredge's intimate conviction as well as that of early Quakers. This translation is a welcomed venture because this is a central piece, deserving of much more attention than that which has been accorded to it until now.
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