Dambudzo Marechera: A Source Book on his Life and Work.

This thoroughly-researched book, consisting of 124 documents linked by passages of biography and commentary, is essential reading for anyone seriously interested in the life and work of one of Africa's most learned, daring, and subversively innovative writers. The work that Flora Veit-Wild and the Dambudzo Marechera Trust are doing in collecting and publishing Marechera's unpublished writings and relevant biographical material might be compared to that of deep-sea divers salvaging treasure from a sunken wreck. At the time of his death, Marechera's unpublished work included six novellas, five plays, and over a hundred poems. The Canadian writer John Wyllie's reports for Heinemann praised "A Bowl for Shadows" for its "splendid and bitter truth" about Africa (202), saying of "The Black Heretic" that if it were joined with other material "the book would be seen as the most important piece of writing to come out of Black Africa" (206). The scandal is that not only were these two works not published: the manuscripts were lost. As for the Zimbabwean scene, Veit-Wild writes:

It must be considered a glaring failure on the part of Zimbabwean publishers and literary editors that during Marechera's life-time not a single collection or selection of his poetry was published apart from the section in Mindblast. Seeing piles of poems …