A Tenderfoot is a novice, someone unaccustomed to hardship. Here, he is a white boy growing up in 1960s Ethiopia, a place he loves even as he learns his own privilege and foreignness. Later he hears rumours of a famine in the mountains and imagines a boy his own age living through it, surviving on angry couplets. Years after, he sees this famine-boy grown up and questions him.
A sequel to Ethiopia Boy, Beckett's celebrated first Carcanet collection, Tenderfoot teems with praise-shouts for Asfaw the cook, for the boys living as minibus conductors or chewing-gum sellers, even for Tenderfoot's own stomach that hangs 'like a leopard in a thorn acacia tree'. Featuring storms and droughts, hunger and desire, donkeys who quote Samuel Johnson and a red bicycle that invites you on a poem tour of Addis Ababa, Tenderfoot takes in what is happening around but also inside the boy's mind and body - a human transformation.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
'These poems are utterly distinctive, there is something at once proud and sad in them, as the reader senses that Tenderfoot loves but stands outside what he loves.'
Sasha Dugdale
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ISBN-13
978-1-78410-972-1 (9781784109721)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Chris Beckett is a poet and translator based in London. He grew up in Addis Ababa in the 1960s, capital of Haile Selassie's glamorous barefoot empire (as he writes in the Preface to Ethiopia Boy). Chris has published two enthusiastically reviewed poetry collections from Carcanet, Ethiopia Boy (2013) and Tenderfoot (2020), imitating Ethiopian praise forms to explore issues of love and hunger; also, with Alemu Tebeje, the first ever anthology of Ethiopian Amharic poetry in English, Songs We Learn from Trees (2020). His poem The broom upside down was commended in the 2024 National Poetry Competition and his books as well as individual poems have won or been shortlisted for awards such as the Poetry London Competition, Ted Hughes Award and Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. His poems, reviews and translations have appeared in leading journals like Poetry Review, Wasafiri, PN Review, Words Without Borders, Modern Poetry in Translation, also in the Library of Congress and on BBC radio's The Verb. Baritone/composer Roderick Williams' setting, 3 Songs from Ethiopia Boy, was premiered by Chineke! Orchestra in the Southbank Centre in 2019 and repeated as part of their 10th anniversary concert in 2025 and numerous times on BBC Radio 3. Visit Chris Beckett's website.
