Mxolisi Nyezwa

The Fragile Beauty of Mangaliso Buzani’s “A Naked Bone”

In 2019, Mangaliso Buzani’s A Naked Bone won the African Poetry Book Fund’s Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. In a subsequent interview published in Africa in Dialogue, Buzani recalls how, upon hearing the news, he quicky phoned fellow poet and New Brighton resident, Mxolisi Nyezwa. This phone call is one that is particularly apt because when you read A Naked Bone there is, hidden within Buzani’s remarkable and dreamlike poetry, a touch of Nyezwa. There is a fragile sort of beauty that poignantly captures a deeply personal suffering.