Belling the Leopard

by Clementine Ewokolo Burnley

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize 2024

In her wide-ranging 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. They witness the changes in family life through the generations as villagers or townsfolk are uprooted or stay put or uproot themselves, defying expectations by leaving or returning.

Her poems address the past only to illuminate what people can become to each other in the present, whether in Africa or Europe. In one sequence a group of university students from far-flung parts discover the freedoms of student halls in Glasgow. In sequences set in the Hebrides old friends recognise a late-blooming love after decades apart. In other poems, a woman consults her scars. Each sight, sound or smell has its threat value in Germany, and children of mixed heritage switch between languages in Italy. Weary of searching outward, women drop anchor in themselves. A couple find grounding in the non-human world that surrounds them. Going back in search of belonging proves futile only because connection was there all along.

Reviews of Belling the Leopard

'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 flâneur. 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