Poetry Africa Biographies - page 2 of 6
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 Tianxin Cai (China)
Denisa Comanescu (Romania)
Evelyn Cresswell (South Africa)
Diana Ferrus (South Africa)
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Tianxin Cai (China)
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 ‘A poet must recognize his own voice; these poems are the home he carries with him as he goes. Each time he encounters a new country he feels he gains new life.’
Chinese poet and mathematician, Cai Tianxin, (1963) received his Ph.D. in number theory from Shandong University in 1987. A talented and versatile writer, Cai has published nine books of poetry, essays, travelogues and biographies. His poems have also been selected for the textbooks of high school and university students. In 1995 he founded the poetry review, Apollinaire, which is now one of the most important underground magazines in China. He has served since 2001 as a judge of the Anne-Gao poetry awards, the Chinese equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. Cai has translated into Chinese the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Octavio Paz, Antonio Porchia, Elizabeth Bishop and Margaret Atwood.
His poems are largely about his daily observations during his travels, seen with a surrealist eye, and have been translated into Arabic and seven western languages, and published in ten countries. He has participated in numerous poetry festivals and has travelled to more than sixty countries. As one Chinese poet has said of him, "A writer is shaped by the distance he travels. Cai’s distances are metaphysical".
Cai is a columnist of the monthly magazine Book City in Shanghai, which is considered the Chinese New Yorker. He now lives in Hangzhou (the most beautiful city in the world, according to Marco Polo) where he is a professor of mathematics at Zhejiang University.
Publications:
Shore, Zheijan Art & Literature Press (Hangzhou), 1992
To Dream Living in the World, Zhishi Press (Beijing(, 1993
Oracle, Dreaming Factory, Beijing, 1995
America, Plane Flying in the Sky, Dreaming Factory, 1998
Travelling Across the Continent, book of prose, Orient, 1999
North, South, biography of E. Bishop, Orient, 2000
La Desnudez Antiqua, Editorial Universidad de Antiogquia, Columbia, 2002
Selected Translation of Poetry & Proses from America, Heibei Education Press (China), 2003
Numbers and Roses, book of essays, 3-COM (Beijing), 2003
Green Blood
Coming back from the north in deep night
I enter my home, turn, closing the door
find on the steps sycamore leaves
left by the typhoon
limbs and trunk already dragged off.
I thought I saw pools of blood
coagulated on the ground.
I remember my parents kept cool
under this tree as they talked
of their grandson, remember
the scene, even remember them
spitting black seeds as they sat.
That was last summer.
This summer, I do not know,
this summer, how they will spend their time.
(translated by John Rosenwald)
poem cc T Cai
Denisa Comanescu (Romania)
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 'For me, writing means passing from hate to love.’
As a young poet, Denisa Comănescu (1954), answered an interviewer’s question “Why do you write?” with the terse statement, “For me, writing means passing from hate to love.” A number of poetry books later her effort to integrate love and hate has widened, and the pain of existing has deepened. Writing in the eighties, a bleak period in recent Romanian history, she, along with other “eightyists” had to smuggle their work past a brutal censorship, as poetry was one of the few ways by which the enduring spirit of the Romanian people could be shown and celebrated.
Comănescu graduated in Romanian and English from the University of Bucharest in1977. She joined Univers Publishing House, where, between 1991 and 2001 she was editor in chief. Since 2001 she is Editorial Director of Polirom Publishing House, Bucharest , and coordinator of the world literature series. At the International Bookarest Book Fair she received the prize for the best series edited.
Comanescu made her poetic debut in the review România Literarặ in 1975, and won the Debut Prize of the Writers Union for her first volume of poetry, Banishment from Paradise. Comanescu’s poetry has been included in several anthologies and she has also translated British and American poetry into Romanian. She translated into Romanian the poems of Alan Brownjohn from the volume Three Contemporary English Poets, and in 1999 she edited the anthology of Romanian Women Poetry – Polish/Romanian edition: Strong – 28 Women Poets of Romania. Comanescu is currently working on an extended anthology of Romanian Women Poetry from 1960 to 2003. Denisa Comanescu has been a member of the Romanian Writers’ Union since 1986, and has been the Secretary of the Romanian PEN Centre, since 1990.
Publications:
Izgonirea din Paradis (Banishment from Paradise), Cartea Romaneasca Publishing House ( Bucharest ), 1979
Cutitul de Argint (The Silver Knife), Eminescu Publishing House ( Bucharest ), 1983
Barca pe Valuri (Boat on the Waves), Cartea Romaneasca Publishing House ( Bucharest ), 1987
Urna de foc (The Trace of Fire), Botosani, Axa Publishing House, 1999
Acum biografia de-atunci (Now My Old Time Biography), Bucharest Eminescu Publishing House, 2000
Included in following anthologies:
Silent Voices, Forest Books, 1986, 1988
Young Poets of a New Romania , Forest Books, 1992
When the Tunnels Meet. Contemporary Romanian Poetry, Bloodaxe Books, 1996
Return from Exile
Eleven years, four months and seventeen days.
Was it a short exile?
This is not the same notebook as then.
I’ve had lots of them.
Some were large, bound in leather, with golden covers,
others small, light, with Bible paper.
I would stealthily touch them at night
stroking their pages like membranes
faster and faster, more and more intense
with insatiable desire.
At day, I would not dare get near them,
as if they were someone else’s private property.
I gave them away to friends, after a while –
it's for your new poetry book, I’d tell them.
To some it brought luck, or so they say.
And then you came,
after eleven years, four months and seventeen days.
Mornings, in the light that seems to elude death,
we fearlessly keep filling in, simple and natural, membrane after membrane.
Each time I turn a full page,
Orpheus turns his eyes away.
poem cc Denisa Comanescu
Evelyn Cresswell (South Africa)
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 ‘Poetry represents beauty in communication with which we can gift and help affirm each other.’
Evelyn Cresswell, was born and educated in Durban with an Honours degree in English from the University of Natal (Pietermaritzburg), married gold medal scientist and political and educational visionary Prof. Christopher Cresswell, and had her wits and her pen sharpened by the social and political situation in South Africa during the Apartheid era. Cresswell taught both formally and informally at tertiary and secondary levels, and in the early 60’s worked in Birmingham clubs defusing racial and gang tensions. She returned to South Africa to initiate the study group and conference programme of the Christian Institute under the courageous leadership of Dr. Beyers Naude that worked to undermine the false theological perspectives undergirding Apartheid. Organisations she belonged to were either banned or consistently harassed.
“Poetry has been the undercurrent of my life. From the basements of Braamfontein in Johannesburg where we met to listen to and encourage young black writers in the ‘60’s, to my present life in Zululand , it is living on the thought and social frontiers of our time that excites me and provides me with inspirational content for my poetry.” ' Soweto 16.6.'76' was the only poem she submitted for publication and it was published in The Rand Daily Mail that same devastating week.
Cresswell's prolific writing and sharing of poetry through her 'lovers of poetry' group caught the attention of Pieter Scholtz and this led to a CD and booklet, 'Touched and Touching'. Her poetry comprises both inner reflections and outer observations, crafted with perceptive care, and singularly radiating sincerity, optimism and hope. Unassuming and humble, Cresswell enjoys adjudicating poetry competitions, both local and national, and fulfils speaking and reading invitations. She remains active in church and educational work, in writing, and in promoting new vision and transformation in South Africa .
Publications:
Touched and Touching, CD, Kwasuka Theatre company, 2002
DANCING INTO BEING.
I dance each minute of the hour
imagining everything.
Do you dance?
Do you let your feet
run with the rhythm
right away from you
being themselves
transported by delight?
Can you leap from a cliff
clutching air
till your free-fall
thermals you to heights
or dashes you to depths?
I would hold hands with you
with our extremities
stretched into the sky;
be an airborne six-point star
or a floating autumn leaf
gently grounding itself to rest.
But first there's the leap
not into the letting-go-of-sleep
but you into me
and I into you
learning to know
what it is
to be free.
poem cc E Cresswell
Diana Ferrus (South Africa) top
"..her poem Tribute to Sarah Baartman was the first poem in French history to be published in a law."
‘Poetry contains (in a few sentences) one's heart, one's state of mind at a certain time in one's life’
‘Poetry educates, it entertains, it can speak to people individually or collectively’
Afrikaans-speaking Diana Ferrus (1953) writes in both English and Afrikaans about personal, political, historical, and social themes. In the 60’s she was a founder member of Bush Poets, an all women poetry group from the University of the Western Cape , and founder member of the Afrikaans Writers Association. Presently busy on a Masters degree in Women’s and Gender Studies with a thesis topic: Black Afrikaans women writers: from the margins to the centre, Ferrus has also done two fellowships in Women’s Studies at the University of Utrecht , Holland .
Ferrus performs her poetry to music and reads at various public occasions, festivals, community celebrations and political rallies and is active in children’s drama and creative writing and poetry workshops especially with women and in disadvantaged communities.
Her cultural activism, which includes vigils, workshops and talks, and the dissemination of her poem Tribute to Sarah Baartman placed her at the cultural forefront of the movement to repatriate Sarah Baartman’s remains. Her poem so moved a French Senator that he used it as part of his argument to have her remains sent home. It was the first time in French history that a poem was published in a law. Ferrus was part of the official delegation to France, performing the poem at the handing over ceremony of her remains in Paris, and appointed to inform the national Minister of Arts and Culture on all matters regarding the burial. She organised the cultural items of the Enrobement ceremony in Cape Town and rendered the poem I’ve come to take you home at the final laying to rest of Sarah Baartman in Hankey in the Eastern Cape . She also assisted with the making of a documentary on the event.
Diana Ferrus is part of a writers exchange to observe how Sri Lankan women deal with conflict and peace, and is working an autobiography centred around the journeys in her life.
Publications:
Short Stories
Die kind (the child) in Die Suid-Afrikaan, 1994
Taxi Staanplek Stories, JL van Schaik Publishers, 1996
Double Trouble in “Veertig is g’n vloekwoord”: Quellerie Books, 1999
Die Stukke wat ons Sn: Kwela Books, 1999
Vrou in die rivier (Woman in the River) in Van oor die kontreie heen, Human & Rousseau Publishers, 2000
Om huis toe te gaan in Stroomversnellings, Kwela Books, 2001
Going home in In the Rapids, Kwela Books, 2001
Poems
Writing; Women of the Struggle; Creative Writing; in New Letters, Quarterly Literary Journal of the University of Missouri , 1998
The visit to Brazil in Women writing to create the future, Vivlia Books, 1998
The African Drum
Reborn, I am an African.
At the feet of my roots
I sit and hear the beat
my heart, the African Drum.
But the rhythm fades
and I'm swept away
by the different sounds of the orchestra
and I see us dance with the world in our hands
and we go fast and we go slow!
I see the girl with the dark-brown skin
and ask if she will dance with me
but she turns away with no remorse
for she could not feel the beat,
my heart, the African Drum!
I see the girl with the light brown hair
and refuse to sing a song with her
but she puts her hand warm into mine
for she could feel the beat,
my heart, the African Drum!
Who am I, the African?
Where lives my heart
and where lives my soul?
How many shades have I, the African?
Who am I -
an African?
Who am I -
an African?
Who am I?
An African!
I am
an African!
poem cc D Ferrus
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