Dambudzo Marechera’s Amelia Love Poems: Innovative or Overrated?

In this debate concerning Marechera’s Amelia love poems, Drew Shaw argues they are innovative, especially in their adaptation of the traditional European sonnet and their exploration of an intercultural love relationship. He commends Marechera’s uncensored psychosexual investigation and his imaginative fusions of Western (Greco-Roman) mythology with late twentieth-century African realities. By contrast, John Eppel finds Marechera is not the innovative master of the English language he claims to be, at least not in this poetry. Identifying structural inadequacies, he argues there is little to distinguish it from plain prose. For Eppel, Marechera is archaically Eurocentric (in his use of metaphor, myth, and turn of phrase) to the detriment of his poetry. Shaw and Eppel clash on their choice of evaluative criteria and use significantly different interpretive methods, but converge to some extent in advocating close critical readings, which have long been neglected in studies of Marechera’s poetry.