Description

In her debut collection, Clementine Ewokolo Burnley asks what remains after once-familiar places and people have gone. The poems criss-cross the Atlantic, beginning in the 1850s. The voices of Caribbean returnees to the west African coast mingle with those of west African recaptives, German missionaries, and kidnappers. The collection pays keen attention to the past only to illuminate what people can become to each other in the present. In the Glasgow sequence a group of university students discover the freedoms of student halls. In the Hebridean sequences old friends recognise a late-blooming love after decades apart. In other poems a woman consults her scars. Weary of searching outward, women drop anchor in themselves. A couple finds grounding in the non-human world that surrounds them. Going back in search of belonging proves futile only because connection was there all along. Joint winner of the James Berry Prize 2024. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Publisher Review

By interweaving languages and cultural symbols so nonchalantly, Belling the Leopard points to a world of fluid identities, where the idea of belonging is both always in question and permanently just within arm’s reach. — Sean Wai Keung, * Gutter * Clementine Ewokolo Burnley’s poems are thoughtful, wry, yet cumulatively disarming in their vivid, sharply observed renditions of diasporic family life. From West Africa to Glasgow, Edinburgh and the Scottish Isles via Lombardy, London and Berlin, hers is the roving, analytical eye of the Afropean flaneur. A compelling storyteller, she shapeshifts between intimate and sociocultural histories, cities and continents, cousins and aunties, via a deft multilingualism that includes English, German and the languages and vernacular of her ancestral homeland, Cameroon. — Karen McCarthy Woolf