When Rains Come (ePub)

When Rains Come, Mzi Mahola's second collection is strongly reminiscent of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The childhood poems, gently nostalgic for a rural and traditional upbringing, are told in a voice that hints at premonitions of regret and anger. The adult poems contemplate the toll taken by liberation on the moral values of a traditional upbringing. The anger is controlled and the bitterness tempered by compassion and humane clear-sightendnedss.

On Strange Things

The myth here expressed is one of a general, sociological Fall, ad is located in the cultural matrix of Intabazebhukazana, Hogsback mountains, which is both a physical and imaginative Eden and Wilderness

-Nicholas Meihuzen, English Academy Review


"...a regretful subtlety that retains a nostalgic innocence while acknowledgng the harsh adult realities.

-Stanley Nyamfukudza, SA Review of Books


Mahola's tone is intensely private, usually meditative and spmbre; and his style has a humble simplicity that might cause his observations to be overlooked.

-Chris Doherty, New Coin


Mzi Mahola was born in 1949 in Lushington, near Alice, in the eastern Cape and grew up under the Hogsback Mountains. He moved to New Brighton and in 1979 became the South African amateur bantamweight champion. He worked for the Port Elizabeth Museum, first as a technical assistant, then as a n educator, until 1997. In 1999 he completed a BA Honors degree in Literature from Vista University with a dissertation on the poet Tatamkhulu Afrika. He married and has four children.


Carapace poets is an imprint of SNAILPRESS.


When rains come is a seventh in a series of collections assciated with Carapace Magazine.

Mzi Mahola's second anthology 'When Rain Comes' was published in 2000 by Carapace and won a Rhode's University Olive Schreiner Literature Prize and the Wits University English Academy for South Africa voted the volume, Best English Poetry Book in South Africa for the period 2000 and 2001. A common High School English poetry collection Textbook reference.