Our Father Is Tired by Susy Delgado (tr. Susan Smith Nash & Delgado)

a nutshell: translated from Guaraní, this free-flowing poem conjures a present where a demoralised god has lost belief in himself and abandoned the world

an image: Delgado exhales beautiful imagery while in the same breath mourning its decease, for instance writing of how the Father no longer scatters his seed in the middle of the earth where sweet breezes unfurl palms destined to live until the end of time

a thought: the poem ends on a deeply pessimistic note, almost dismissing a future altogether, at least dismissing any vision for it – it left me intrigued about what’s held in the rest of Delgado’s extensive oeuvre

a fact: I read this poem in Words Without Borders’ July 2020 issue The Indigenous Writing Project: Contemporary Guaraní Poetry; Paraguay is a bilingual country, where most of the population speaks Spanish and Guaraní, an indigenous language – in Guaraní, word and soul are one word: ñe’ ẽ

want to read Our Father Is Tired? visit here (also, take a look at another brilliant poem from Paraguay here)

Collected Stories by Patricia Grace

a nutshell: gathering stories by one of New Zealand’s most prominent Māori authors, Grace’s writing offers a fascinating insight into life in this corner of the world

a line: “It’s fashionable for a Pakeha to have a Māori for a friend”

an image: Grace’s loving descriptions of the landscape were a highlight for me, particularly as I was reading it while travelling around NZ’s South Island – observations of the sun putting its finger on everything, the sky rightly bestowing tears on earth, lupins, ledges, and a joyous big stink of pigs

a thought: one story that will stay with me for some time was ‘Journey’, which closes with an old man sitting on the edge of his bed looking at his palms, utterly dejected & heartbroken after an exhausting effort to try to defend his land from development – insisting that “if it’s your stamping ground and you have your ties there, then there’s no land equal, surely that wasn’t hard to understand”

a fact: Waiariki (1975), which is included in this book, was the first short story collection by a Māori woman writer

want to read Collected Stories? visit here

Southpaw by Lisa St Aubin de Terán

a nutshell: written over 25 years, these dogged short stories of dispossessed individuals are set first on or around the Hacienda Santa Rita (a sugar plantation in the Venezuelan Andes) then in Umbria, Italy – two places where the author chanced to live

a line: “Life took longer to live in the wet weather”

an image: SPOILER | for me, ‘Eladio and the Boy’ was an especially moving story – I found myself genuinely upset by the scene of inexplicable loss when Eladio’s quiet friendship with a pair of eagles is shattered by human intrusion & violence

a thought: I looked up the definition of southpaw: (1) a boxer whose strongest hand is the left (2) a person who uses their left hand to do most things – which I assume alludes to the stories’ contexts of South America and southern Italy, as well as the narratives of eccentricity (since left-handedness was historically perceived as such) and the characters’ ability both to receive and to administer blows

a fact: in the intro, the writer openly labels herself an “alien observer” in these communities; in the absence of anywhere specific to call home, she says she found an “emotional home in other people’s roots”

want to read Southpaw? visit here

No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference by Greta Thunberg

a nutshell: a terrifyingly necessary call to action, this collection of speeches by Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg (b.2003) – who sparked a global movement via school strikes – should be compulsory reading worldwide, esp. for politicians & businesses

a line: “We children are doing this to wake the adults up. We children are doing this for you to put your differences aside and start acting as you would in a crisis. We children are doing this because we want our hopes and dreams back.”

an image: Greta repeatedly calls for world leaders to act as if our house is on fire, that is, to respond with the level of panic that this global emergency demands and to drop the business-as-usual complacency

a thought: condemning the UK’s ongoing support for new exploitation of fossil fuels (the shale-gas fracking industry, the expansion of the North Sea oil & gas fields, the expansion of airports, the planning permission for a new coal mine), Greta predicts that this recklessness will be recalled as one of humankind’s greatest failures

a fact: scientists unanimously tell us we have just 11 years before setting off an irreversible chain reaction, way beyond human control, that will probably be the end of our civilisation as we know it – how can we not act on that knowledge?

want to read No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference? visit here