Counting the Chiperoni

Chiperoni: term for a kind of fog, drizzle rain, experienced in the Shire Highlands of southern Malawi during the cold, dry season; name derived from Mount Chiperone, an isolated mountain peak at the southern extremity of East African mountain ranges, covered with montane forests and surrounded by deciduous woodlands.

‘The sinuous rhythms and arresting imagery in Counting the Chiperoni take us on journeys through landscape and time, along lines of history – political and colonial, personal and cultural. Colourful, soulful and prismatic, here is a kind of pilgrimage through poetry itself. From elegant, observational sonnet to mellifluous prose poem, each piece is a small, bright study in care for language and its power to illuminate deeper truths about change and its cost.’ – Kim Kelly, author of the acclaimed novella Wild Chicory

Adèle Ogiér Jones has lived and worked in Malawi over different periods since 2007. Poems in Counting the Chiperoni were written between 2017 and 2018. They are grouped in three sections, opening with those related to ‘chiperoni’, the weather phenomenon coming from Mozambique, affecting Malawi’s southern Shire Highlands around Blantyre. Then ‘bush and plantation’ includes poems on changing land use; followed by the longest part of the collection ‘and its people’, which moves between local people’s memories rewritten here as poems, and the poet’s own reflections on present-day life, work, and customs affected by environmental and economic changes.