In this unprecedented anthology, acclaimed poets from around the world select poems from their countries of origin to share with a wider audience. Readers will find eloquence, urgency, and idiosyncrasy, poems all in English but springing from drastically varied voices, geographies, and histories. Using an artist’s rather than a scholar’s approach, these poems — chosen out of love and admiration by practicing poets — show the vitality of English deployed by revered and emerging poets in Ghana (selected by Kwame Dawes), India (by Sudeep Sen), South Africa (by Rustum Kozain), the Caribbean (by Ishion Hutchinson and five other Caribbean poets), Canada (by Todd Swift), and the Antipodes: New Zealand (by Hinemoana Baker) and Australia (by Les Murray). Mindful of the contentious history of colonization and its staining of any notion of a unified Anglophone poetics, editors Catherine Barnett and Tiphanie Yanique have created an “anthology of anthologies”: a choral oratorio, a many-accented gathering of voices that invites further discovery and promotes an intra-cultural conversation. Featured poets include: Ama Ata Aidoo, Tatamkulu Afrika, Kofi Anyidoho, Tusiata Avia, Kofi Awoonor, Marion Bethel, Christian Bök, Jenny Bornholdt, Dionne Brand, Kamau Brathwaite, Diana Brebner, Abena Busia, Michelle Cahill, Christian Campbell, Vahni Capildeo, Priya Sarukkai Chabria, Amit Chaudhuri, George Elliot Clarke, Jennifer Compton, Jeremy Cronin, Mahadai Das, Ingrid de Kok, Peter Goldsworthy, Lorna Goodison, Bernadette Hall, Lesbia Harford, Shake Keane, A. M. Klein, Shara McCallum, Bill Manhire, Kei Miller, Arthur Nortje, Kwadwo Opoku-Agyeman, Richard Outram, P. K. Page, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Olive Senior, Mongane Wally Serote, Kenneth Slessor, Kelwyn Sole, Billy Marshall Stoneking, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Habib Tiwoni, Hone Tuwhare, Priscila Uppal, Chris van Wyk, David Wevill, Judith Wright, and many more.

In recent decades, much of the most vital literature written in English has come from the former colonies of Great Britain. But while postcolonial novelists such as Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, and V. S. Naipaul have been widely celebrated, the achievements of postcolonial poets have been strangely neglected.

In The Hybrid Muse, Jahan Ramazani argues that postcolonial poets have also dramatically expanded the atlas of literature in English, infusing modern and contemporary poetry with indigenous metaphors and creoles. A rich and vibrant poetry, he contends, has issued from the hybridization of the English muse with the long resident muses of Africa, India, and the Caribbean. Starting with the complex case of Ireland, Ramazani closely analyzes the work of leading postcolonial poets and explores key questions about the relationship between poetry and postcolonialism. As inheritors of both imperial and native cultures, poets such as W. B. Yeats, Derek Walcott, Louise Bennett, A. K. Ramanujan, and Okot p'Bitek invent compelling new forms to articulate the tensions and ambiguities of their cultural in-betweeness. They forge hybrid figures, vocabularies, and genres that embody the postcolonial condition.

Engaging an array of critical topics, from the aesthetics of irony and metaphor to the politics of nationalism and anthropology, Ramazani reconceptualizes issues central to our understanding of both postcolonial literatures and twentieth-century poetry. The first book of its kind, The Hybrid Muse will help internationalize the study of poetry, and in turn, strengthen the place of poetry in postcolonial studies.