I've had a couple of volumes of poetry published myself, yet I can't honestly say that, if imprisoned by my government for entirely spurious reasons, I'd have the willpower to write more. Yet that's what Mapanje has done, and the anger and resentment that resonates through this collection is palpable. There's one terribly affecting poem here about finally being released just two months after his mother's death, after she waited years for him to be set free. Another, too, about one of his own banned books, and the injustice of censorship, is equally compelling. Furthermore, one of the included poems here is titled "Where Dissent Is Meat for Crocodiles" and that is in itself, I think, a warning of the necessity of freedom of speech, and how badly a government becomes corrupted when trying to undermine it.

I know, it must be said, vanishingly little about the history of Malawi, and so I'm sure that much of this went over my head. However, the experiences of a persecuted writer are something I'm always going to sympathise with, and that's entirely beside the empathy one human being should feel for another under the appalling circumstances that Mapanje and his fellow inmates suffered.