The Rest is Silence

These poems leave me with that feeling of spinning round and round... faster and faster... with sudden stops and I am often thrown off the pedestal in a delicious cloud of dizziness. There is the delicate Kathy; crawling out of malady, hanging on for a little while, haunted and in return haunting the persona. In a moment of sheer brilliance, Kathy tries "to catch the dark," with her bare hands and sometimes "she swims in the shadows." Then there is the affable Valerie. She is the bright day... and she is a cigarette which tries to slowly enter between the lips of a wayfarer...Valerie is "as young as the clock and old as time." In The Rest is Silence, Tafadzwa Chiwanza offers us electrifying poems which show us that although life is not a path of glory, at last we reach a place where hope blends with sorrow; the golden edges of sunshine where the shadows end. ~Memory Chirere, University of Zimbabwe. In this collection, Chiwanza's sharp intellect, eye for detail and surprising choice of metaphors stand out. But it is also his intentional unveiling of what it means to watch the imminent arrival of death and loss that enables this collection to have a unity of effect. All the poems are working towards that singular effect, so that long after you have gone through the collection, the echoes of it will continue to haunt you. Grief, in the hands of a poet of Chiwanza's capability, is as bewitching as the legendary brew of my grandmother, VaHarutyi, or, as Chiwanza the accountant would say, as bewitching as money itself! ~Tanaka Chidora, author of Because Sadness is Beautiful? (2019)