These poems leave me with that feeling of spinning round and round… faster and faster…
with sudden stops and I am often thrown off the pedestal in a delicious cloud of dizziness.
There is the delicate Kathy; crawling out of malady, hanging on for a little while, haunted and
in return haunting the persona.  In a moment of sheer brilliance, Kathy tries “to catch the
dark,” with her bare hands and sometimes “she swims in the shadows.” Then there is the
affable Valerie. She is the bright day… and she is a cigarette which tries to slowly enter
between the lips of a wayfarer…Valerie is “as young as the clock and old as time.”  In The
Rest is Silence, Tafadzwa Chiwanza offers us electrifying poems which show us that although
life is not a path of glory, at last we reach a place where hope blends with sorrow; the golden
edges of sunshine where the shadows end.
~Memory Chirere, University of Zimbabwe. 

In this collection, Chiwanza’s sharp intellect, eye for detail and surprising choice of
metaphors stand out. But it is also his intentional unveiling of what it means to watch the
imminent arrival of death and loss that enables this collection to have a unity of effect. All the
poems are working towards that singular effect, so that long after you have gone through the
collection, the echoes of it will continue to haunt you. Grief, in the hands of a poet of
Chiwanza’s capability, is as bewitching as the legendary brew of my grandmother, VaHarutyi,
or, as Chiwanza the accountant would say, as bewitching as money itself!
~Tanaka Chidora, author of Because Sadness is Beautiful? (2019)

ISBN

These poems leave me with that feeling of spinning round and round… faster and faster…
with sudden stops and I am often thrown off the pedestal in a delicious cloud of dizziness.
There is the delicate Kathy; crawling out of malady, hanging on for a little while, haunted and
in return haunting the persona.  In a moment of sheer brilliance, Kathy tries “to catch the
dark,” with her bare hands and sometimes “she swims in the shadows.” Then there is the
affable Valerie. She is the bright day… and she is a cigarette which tries to slowly enter
between the lips of a wayfarer…Valerie is “as young as the clock and old as time.”  In The
Rest is Silence, Tafadzwa Chiwanza offers us electrifying poems which show us that although
life is not a path of glory, at last we reach a place where hope blends with sorrow; the golden
edges of sunshine where the shadows end.
~Memory Chirere, University of Zimbabwe. 

In this collection, Chiwanza’s sharp intellect, eye for detail and surprising choice of
metaphors stand out. But it is also his intentional unveiling of what it means to watch the
imminent arrival of death and loss that enables this collection to have a unity of effect. All the
poems are working towards that singular effect, so that long after you have gone through the
collection, the echoes of it will continue to haunt you. Grief, in the hands of a poet of
Chiwanza’s capability, is as bewitching as the legendary brew of my grandmother, VaHarutyi,
or, as Chiwanza the accountant would say, as bewitching as money itself!
~Tanaka Chidora, author of Because Sadness is Beautiful? (2019)

ISBN