Living in the Delta, Landeg White's Collected and New Poems, brings together work from nine previous collections. Welsh by birth, White is a citizen of the world, having lived and written and taught on three continents. It is a Welsh tradition of course to be a traveller, voyager and settler in all parts of the planet, and White's poetry embodies this. It also reflects the ancient Welsh tradition of the poet-scholar; he is a noted academic-editor, translator and historian-an authority on Africa and Portuguese literature. Fortunately for us he is a poet too, talented and dedicated. The experience of reading his writing make you want to read more-it is warm, humane, intelligent and immensely readable. Commentators on his work are apt to use politically incorrect words and phrases such as 'masterpiece' and 'major poet'. He is a brilliant comic writer for instance, and can move in an instant from sly wit to laugh-out-loud funny. Yet suddenly with a poem like 'African Incident' you are in the midst of tragedy.He is a moving celebrant of love and family and community; a passionate, meticulous observer of the natural world-it is difficult to think of a living writer who is a more complete poet.

For a number of years now Landeg White's poetry has been virtually unavailable. This new collection should help overcome that problem. The scope in this collection is broad, and brings with it various flavors of the "exotic" that mark White out as individual, and indeed unique among poets from Wales. But these flavors are not mere local color. He has been assimilated within the cultural scenes of various African and Caribbean countries and understands the political situations there. And his poems about his new home of Portugal display a manifest and hard-won interest in everything from cuisine to literature to the environment. This is a book of journeys, of memorable encounters, of familial duties in foreign places. It's a carefully crafted collection by a writer who believes in the importance of rhyme and rhythm. Form--relaxed but present--is precious to White. His rhyme schemes and sometimes traditional cadences illustrate a poet in tight control of his material and muse. Above all, the poems have a marvelous accessibility.

Luis de Camoes is world famous as the author of the great Renaissance epic "The Lusiads," but his large and equally great body of lyric poetry is still almost completely unknown outside his native Portugal. In "The Collected Lyric Poems of Luis de Camoes," the award-winning translator of "The Lusiads" gives English readers the first comprehensive collection of Camoes's sonnets, songs, elegies, hymns, odes, eclogues, and other poems--more than 280 lyrics altogether, all rendered in engaging verse.

Camoes (1524-1580) was the first great European artist to cross into the Southern Hemisphere, and his poetry bears the marks of nearly two decades spent in north and east Africa, the Persian Gulf, India, and Macau. From an elegy set in Morocco, to a hymn written at Cape Guardafui on the northern tip of Somalia, to the first modern European love poems for a non-European woman, these lyrics reflect Camoes's encounters with radically unfamiliar peoples and places. Translator Landeg White has arranged the poems to follow the order of Camoes's travels, making the book read like a journey. The work of one of the first European cosmopolitans, these poems demonstrate that Camoes would deserve his place among the great poets even if he had never written his epic."

After a lifetime of travelling, and six books of poetry on the move, Landeg White in "Arab Work" is trying something new - with poems about settling, building and planting in a country where he is a stranger. His chosen forms - lyric, ode, sonnet, eclogue, elegy, epithalamium - point to a new engagement with British tradition; but his older themes are still present, as poetry fights back in an embattled world with tenderness and lyricism, celebrations of family love and the ramshackle heroism of ordinary people.

January, 1890 - Britain threatens Portugal with an ultimatum: abandon south-east Africa or face a naval bombardment of Lisbon. Yet the area under dispute is impenetrable swamp - will the Great Powers really go to war over such wilderness? -- Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru

First published in 1572, The Lusiads is one of the greatest epic poems of the Renaissance, immortalizing Portugal's voyages of discovery with an unrivalled freshness of observation. At the centre of The Lusiads is Vasco da Gama's pioneer voyage via southern Africa to India in 1497-98. The first European artist to cross the equator, Camoes's narrative reflects the novelty and fascination of that original encounter with Africa, India and the Far East. The poem's twin symbols are the Cross and the Astrolabe, and its celebration of a turning point in mankind's knowledge of the world unites the old map of the heavens with the newly discovered terrain on earth. Yet it speaks powerfully, too, of the precariousness of power, and of the rise and decline of nationhood, threatened not only from without by enemies, but from within by loss of integrity and vision. The first translation of The Lusiads for almost half a century, this new edition is complemented by an illuminating introduction and extensive notes. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

In the 1960s, Landeg White was chief arranger and bass pan player for Trinidad's Camboulays Steel Band. Forty years on, that same music can be heard in this, his 8th collection of poetry. Versatile in form, sensuous in language, cosmopolitan in range, White renews poetry's oldest themes. His celebrations of love, language, anger and mortality are securely earthed in Portugal where he now lives.

Highly regarded for their interdisciplinary approach to the history of central and southern Africa, Leroy Vail and Landeg White now provide us with a thorough study of the political role of the poet in the oral societies of southern Africa.

Magomero is a vivid historical portrait of a Malawian village from 1859 to the present day. It focuses on a region which saw historically important political activity, in the founding of a colony of freed slaves and the rising of an independent church movement against white estate owners. With the dual concerns of a Southern African specialist and a poet, Landeg White offers an 'inside' view of social, political and economic change in Malawi, seen through the lives of individuals: the ordinary men and women, whose situation and poverty have hitherto prevented recognition of their vital contribution to African history.