Anzhelina Polonskaya, (1969) worked as an ice dancer in Moscow and travelled with a Russian troupe to Central and South America. She began writing poems at the age of eighteen and later quit ice dancing to devote herself to writing. Unlike the majority of Russian poets, Polonskaya did not receive a classical literary education, and her poetry comes almost exclusively out of her own experience and out of her own thoughts. She is, however, well read in Russian, Anglo-American and in Spanish poetry, and her lack of literary education allows her to be freer in her poetry than her contemporaries who appear more steeped in tradition.

At a poetry festival at Northwestern University, USA, which featured three generations of poets from Russia, Poland and Slovenia, Andrei Voznesensky took part as the older generation and proposed Polonskaya as representative of the younger generation. Andrew Wachtel, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature, writes in the foreword of her latest book, The Voice, "A number of thematic concerns that will reappear frequently in Polonskaya’s poetry are apparent here: a fascination with desolate places, with a complex synaesthesia of sound, sight, touch and smell, the omnipresence of maimed bodies and death. Though not directly alluding to the bloody conflict taking place today between Russians and Chechens, it does seem that her military poems are influenced by her political views. The poem, A Bar, Soldiers, and Death, is almost Goyesque in its grotesque and powerful evocation of conflict".

My Heavenly Torch, Smena Magazine, 1993

Poems, Moscow Writer Publishing House, 1998

The Sky Through a Private’s Eye, 1999

A Voice, Podkova (Moscow), 2002

A Voice: Selected Poems, to be published with English translations by A. Wachtel, Northwestern University Press (Chicago), October 2003

A voice bouncing off boarded-up windows, a quivering voice

within walls like well-driven nails.

A throaty voice, as of a caged dove,

groping through deaf darkness into bunches of hanging fingers.

Through them, through the air heated by snow,

torn apart like fabric, like flesh that has known the scalpel.

How silent it is! Either a hot flash on the cheek

or simply snowflakes melting and rolling down like tears.

That voice! Free, unmaimed by wheels, not pursued,

edgy, floating beneath the damp stone vaults,

remarked only by the lightning glances of parishioners

who will remain in this blue twilight, today or tomorrow.

poem cc Anzhelina Polonskaya translation by A. Wachtel

Lesego Rampolokeng (1965), belongs to the "Children of Soweto" generation, and was part of the Black Consciousness Movement demonstrations against apartheid. He grew up and still lives in Orlando West, Soweto, Johannesburg, establishing a writing and performing lifestyle with original rap and blues poems. His early work reflects influences from diverse sources: the reggae of dub Caribbean poets, like Linton Kwesi Johnson, the strident political rap of North Americans such as Gil Scot-Heron, street poetry, as well as elements from talking dithoko songs, stemming from seSotho traditions. Increasingly Rampolokeng has emerged from being labeled the "enfant- terrible angry- voice" and his incisive bitter-sweet bite has made this wordsmith one of the most widely sought after of South Africa’s contemporary poets on stages around the world.

Sometimes called a city poet, Rampolokeng comments on in-your-face existence with a rhythmically crafted mix of subtleness and brazen bravado. 

Sometimes called a city poet, Rampolokeng comments on in-your-face existence with a rhythmically crafted mix of subtleness and brazen bravado. ‘One measure of a poet is what he is prepared to take on, and Rampolokeng is prepared to take on everything: history, politics, religion, war, economics, obscenity, consumerism, silliness, sexual hypocrisy and his own contradictions…He embarrasses people whenever he opens his mouth, one of the time-honoured functions of the poet. The listener is not sure whether he/she is being insulted or entertained, but maybe, because of this uncertainty, starts, possibly, hopefully, to think’ (Berold/Sunday Independent).

On the relationship between performing and publication he has this to say: "I’ve always tried to tread the midline between the word in motion, the word free – I mean without bounds – and the written word. I’ve always tried in a way to marry the two: tried to make poetry that would leave a smudge on the page as it would on the stage." (New Coin)

Publications:

Horns for Hondo, Cosaw (Johannesburg), 1991

Talking Rain, Cosaw (Johannesburg), 1993

End Beginnings, CD/MC Shifty Music (Pretoria), 1993

Rap Master Supreme - Word Bomber in the Extreme: Lesego Rampolokeng; texts and an interview, edited and translated into German by Thomas Brückner, 1996

Bavino Sermons, UNP Press, 1999

(poem to come)

In her first collection of poetry, Could Love a Man, Susan Stenson (1960) appears before the reader as a fully realized talent, as someone who has been writing for decades instead of only a few years. Winner of a number of awards including the 1999 League of Canadian Poets National Poetry Competition, Stenson’s work has appeared in most literary magazines and journals in Canada, on CBC radio and in numerous anthologies. Since 1992 she has co-published and co-edited The Claremont Review, voted ‘magazine of the year’ by Write Magazine of Toronto in 2000, a literary journal showcasing young adult writers. Stenson teaches English and Creative Writing to high school students in Vancouver but is currently teaching at Waterford Kamhlaba United World College, Mbabane, Swaziland.

Stenson’s poetry reveals an anarchy and authority, lit up by honesty, humour and an incandescent humanity. In his review of Could Love a Man, Terence Young writes, "Hers is a landscape that runs from the heat of Mazatlán to the damp streets of Dublin. Along the way, she pulls us into gardens where infidelity grows wild, into hotel rooms and private schools, up the mountain slopes of Machu Picchu. We meet lucky drunks and dying men, pregnant women who drive taxis. We sit in bars alongside ‘winter’s low paunch of sun,’ and we listen, because in this book a powerful voice is speaking."

In her manuscript-in-progress, My Mother Agrees with the Dead, Stenson "explores the vagaries of grief; the after-glow of sorrow, the longing for ritual, and the yearning that is elegy."

A Little More Swing, A Little Less Sway, Reference West, 1997

Threshold: six women, six poets, Sono Nis Press, 1998

Could Love a Man, Sono Nis Press, 2001

When the phone rings, I stop making jam.

Remember the country, picking berries

through the last days of June, crouching

low to spot the ripe ones, our backs aching

with the strain, each long row, dizzy.

When the phone rings, I stop making jam.

My fingers so sticky, can’t use them to count

the seconds between How is she? and Hello?

In the pause, return to the field.

Hat and sun dress, basket full of fruit.

I knock the jam off the counter,

a body’s way of catching up to bad

news, makes a mess of the stove.

So much to clean in a kitchen.

I lick my fingers first,

one by one, an animal licking

its grief, such a useless tongue.

The telephone sticky sweet. The floor.