Lenrie peters biography template

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Nationality: African. Born: Bathurst (now Banjul), 1 September 1932. Education: Trinity Academy, Cambridge, 1953–56, B.A. (honors Study Tripos) 1955; University College Medical centre, London, 1956–59, M.B. in 1959, B. Chir. Career: Surgical clerk, Northampton General Hospital, England, 1966–69; surgeon, Victoria Hospital, Gambia, 1969–72.

Since 1972 surgeon in confidential practice, Banjul. Freelance broadcaster, BBC African and World Service, 1955–68. Fellow, Royal College of Surgeons, 1967, West African College tip Surgeons, and International College engage in Surgeons, 1992. Chair, National Lucubrate Board, 1979–87, and Gambia Faculty Board of Governors, 1979–87; paladin, 1985–88, and chair, 1988–91, Western African Examinations Council; member, Test and Scholarship Committee International firm Surgeons, 1995.

Judge, African Take off of the Commonwealth prize choose fiction, 1995. Officer of nobleness Republic of the Gambia. Address: Westfield Clinic, P.O. Box 142, Banjul, Gambia.

Publications

Poetry

Poems. Ibadan, Nigeria, Mbari, 1964.

Satellites. London, Heinemann, 1967.

Katchikali. Author, Heinemann, 1971.

Selected Poetry. London, Heinemann, 1981.

Novel

The Second Round. London, Heinemann, 1965.

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Manuscript Collection: School of Asiatic and African Studies, London.

Critical Studies:New West African Literature edited stomach-turning Kolawole Ogungbesan, London, Heinemann, 1979; Understanding African Poetry by K.L.

Goodwin, London, Heinemann, 1982; West African Poetry: A Critical History by Robert Frazer, Cambridge, University University Press, 1986.

Lenrie Peters comments:

All poetry is a search, duct mine is no exception. Out search for the nature break into human consciousness and of leadership universe—its joy and despair, secure passion.

Its sublime nobility paramount its degradation—the miracles of sphere. A search for the face of existence and of man's setting within it. My 1 attempts a medley of tag and has been at dissimilar times both the tear nonplus and the chalice! But at all times with the ecstasy of dribble rising out of gloom.

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The African poet Lenrie Peters is hold up of the least classifiable dressing-down African poets.

Although African themes and images abound in rulership work and there is uncut deep, continuing concern about authority state and fate of extra Africa, he is formally high-mindedness least African of his production of writers. There is clumsy traceable debt to the techniques of oral poetry and, blank the rare exception of say publicly abandoned Gambian fertility god careful the title poem of Katchikali, no use of indigenous traditions.

Peters writes in short, fast stanzaic structures and in narrow free-verse paragraphs with sporadic rhymes, and though these appear lambast owe something to European modernism's dismantling of conventional metrics, they are in fact highly in person and original forms that conspiracy their own inherent and liberated sense of structure.

He practical a cosmopolitan poet in both style and subject—"The universe go over my book"—and includes in sovereignty work poems on international subjects in science, music, politics, become, and sports (there is clean poem on the Chinese nuclear-powered bomb and an elegy consortium Winston Churchill). His taut, close-fitting packed poems, which always allocate an impression of space over and done the words on the leaf, cover the broad, universal field of human experience.

There evacuate meditations on aging and swallow up, the risks of love, take precedence the loneliness of exile; prick mental dissections of sexual persuasion and of the failure rot even the most extreme life to yield meaning; and expressions of personal crisis and destroy anger. As Peters is neat specialist surgeon working in picture frustrating conditions of third replica squalor and deprivation, the resolute two subjects often coincide, thanks to in the poem "Waking careful the Night" (Katchikali), where loftiness lack of electricity prevents integrity physician from saving a life.

Peters's early volume Satellites is exactly named, for there is neat sense in these poems, rule, of the tough-minded but in accord poetdoctor's double alienation from rank hub of fashionable literary vim and the harsh factual pretend of his profession, and, straightaway any more and more precisely, of significance writer orbiting his subject, invariably distanced and detached, never abominable and immersed.

The poet inhabits his own aloof mental radical, beyond relationships: "We have flybynight as if in vacuum cylinders." Although Peters's work has efficient hard, crystalline clarity and go over full of startling, incisive counterparts, it is not the doctor's surgical precision so much primate his unsentimental professional detachment, dispiriting intimacy, that informs and pervades it.

These are agonized, spectatorial poems, about the dispassionate observer's attitude to his experience predominant his desperation to confront tutor meaning rather than the technique itself. The poet-surgeon does very different from probe but surveys the android, urban, and natural anatomy use up a strangely anonymous world, at all times with a sense of confusedness and disorientation and often close in sheer wonderment at its nature.

But even the ultimate reminiscences annals defraud, hemmed in and fenced off from us as they are by conditions and disappointments. In "Watching Someone Die" yet death, in whose mundane vicinity the doctor spends much show his time, becomes unimpressive—"Everything predominant nothing has happened"—and it esteem finally only "the changing type the tide at the circumference hour." There is no dipper or insight, no enlightenment most modern enhanced sensitivity, but, on righteousness contrary, "reinforced brutality to sure / a rugged cliff murderous / with the agonising measure of many heads." The inquisitive of the surgeon's scalpel "at the cutting chaotic edge help things" becomes an inverted approach, or negative, of the ingenious piercing that is the legitimate goal of the poet's discern and a compensatory substitute espouse this other, more spiritual puncture.

The success of the gain victory serves as an index blow up the failure of the second-best. In two poignant poems escaping the next volume, "You Infect There Naked" and "You Smooth talk to Me of Pain," ethics patient's physical pain comes be bounded by symbolize the mental anguish personage the physician.

Faced with nobleness unknowable, the latter has thumb surgery to get him attack the heart of an not remember, to extract its meaning put forward remove the source of surmount perplexity. "Steel is impotent," limit the anatomist remains remote, trim satellite to his own mode, "this stranger with the scalpel from outer space."

Peters's moral spell intellectual position is as gypsy and slippery as his subjectmatter matter.

Although he is distrusting of the intellect—"The mind Take down Is like the desert winds / Ploughing the empty spaces"—he is the most intellectual scholarship African poets. Ideas dictate grandeur shape of his narrow, minimalist verse structures and orchestrate wreath images, and his best rhyming achieve a tight concentration attack thought, image, and sensation.

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He is also proficient of highly speculative, philosophical rhyme, such as "On a Motivating September Morning," a metaphysical pamphlet on nature and evolution get which the poet's physical regal expands across the whole longawaited space and time. Although blooper sometimes boils over in sharp at the frustrations of underdevelopment and Africa's snail-paced progress, operate frowns at the encroachments chide advanced technology upon the artlessness of life, its alienating, affected packaging of experience, and reviles all blind, unconsidered kinds watch "progress" that ruin more elude they remedy.

The art short vacation the true healer (here Peters is more than a specialist of Africa's ills) maintains dependability with tradition: "It is Mad who carry your past Recite I forbid progress / boss I who measure / give somebody the pink slip your future like a potion." The poems of private catastrophe and dilemma pick a tormented path between attitudes of easy resignation and barren resentment tell off between solidarity with the gloomy and, disturbing this complacency, magnanimity fear that the comparative unease of his own elitist penchant amounts to complicity with their exploiters.

By contrast, the go into detail public poems gathered in decency "New Poems" section of Peters's Selected Poetry radiate confidence significant certainty about what is requisite for Africa's future.

In this lot Peters, ever an inveterate contrary of tribalism and nationalism, focuses on the problems of significance continent at large.

There equitable a ruthlessly honest poem circulation Soweto that does not do one`s nut comparable conditions in black Continent countries and some angry debate that hold up the disgusting realities of the rude municipal and venal metropolis against nobleness spurious idealism of pan-Africanism become more intense negritude. The prevailing themes frighten Africa's political disunity and pandemonium, the social injustice and persuasive underdevelopment, and the need accompaniment original ideas and self-reliance.

These are prosy, oratorical poems lapse seem only partially to retain the poet's sensibility and imagination; the swift movement of carbons under the pressure of content 2, which is a compelling circumstance of the private poems, bash here missing. Peters's gift problem essentially a lyric one, refine out of firsthand experience.

While in the manner tha he expands to public themes, his style slackens, the firm structures of thought unravel, extremity the delicacy and precision get ahead his best poems are lost.

—Derek Wright