Songs We Learn from Trees

This is the very first anthology of Ethiopian poetry in English, packed with all the energy, wit, and heartache of a beautiful country and language. From folk and religious poems, warrior boasts, praises of women and kings and modern plumbing; through a flowering of literary poets in the twentieth century; right up to thirty of the most exciting contemporary Amharic poets working both inside and outside the country. These poems ask what it means to be Ethiopian today, part of a young, fast-growing economy, heirs to the one African state which was never colonised, but beset by deep political, ethnic, and moral problems.


Finalist for the 2021 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry.