Songs We Learn from Trees: An Anthology of Ethiopian Amharic Poetry

Finalist for the 2021 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry

This is the very first anthology of Ethiopian poetry in English, packed with all the energy, wit and heartache of a beautiful country and language. From folk and religious poems, warrior boasts, praises of women and kings and modern plumbing; through a flowering of literary poets in the twentieth century; right up to thirty of the most exciting contemporary Amharic poets working both inside and outside the country.
These poems ask what it means to be Ethiopian today, part of a young fast-growing economy, heirs to the one African state which was never colonised, but beset by deep political, ethnic and moral problems.
Join the #songfromtrees virtual launch tour on our YouTube channel, for new videos from contributors every day between 8th - 13th June 2020.


About the Author :
Chris Beckett is a poet and translator based in London. He grew up in Addis Ababa in the 1960s, capital of Haile Selassie’s glamorous barefoot empire (as he writes in the Preface to Ethiopia Boy). Chris has published two enthusiastically reviewed poetry collections from Carcanet, Ethiopia Boy (2013) and Tenderfoot (2020), imitating Ethiopian praise forms to explore issues of love and hunger; also, with Alemu Tebeje, the first ever anthology of Ethiopian Amharic poetry in English, Songs We Learn from Trees (2020). His poem The broom upside down was commended in the 2024 National Poetry Competition and his books as well as individual poems have won or been shortlisted for awards such as the Poetry London Competition, Ted Hughes Award and Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. His poems, reviews and translations have appeared in leading journals like Poetry Review, Wasafiri, PN Review, Words Without Borders, Modern Poetry in Translation, also in the Library of Congress and on BBC radio’s The Verb. Baritone/composer Roderick Williams’ setting, 3 Songs from Ethiopia Boy, was premiered by Chineke! Orchestra in the Southbank Centre in 2019 and repeated as part of their 10th anniversary concert in 2025 and numerous times on BBC Radio 3. Visit Chris Beckett's website. Alemu Tebeje is an Ethiopian journalist, poet, lyric writer and human rights campaigner who left Ethiopia in the early 1990s and now lives next to Grenfell Tower in London. He runs the website www.debteraw.com and his poems have been published in Amharic, Chinese and English, as well as being projected on buildings in Denmark, Italy, USA and UK by US artist, Jenny Holzer. His first bilingual collection of poems, Greetings to the People of Europe, was published by Tamrat Books in 2018 and includes the script of a sketch commissioned by BBC Radio 4 for a migrant re-imagining of Homer's Odyssey, My Name is Nobody.

Review :

'The range of styles and tones is impressive: from sorrowful love laments and witty socio-political satire to tense existentialist poems and sombre historical meditations...lovers of literature will delight in the aesthetic virtuosity of the poems...this anthology is a painstaking declaration of love for the poetic traditions of Ethiopia and its diaspora, and will likely make the reader fall in love with these traditions as well.'
Sara Marzagora, Wasafiri

'This wide-ranging anthology is a pleasure to read. It opens a long overdue window into the way Ethiopians approach the craft of poetry.'
Malika Booker

'This book is a vital contribution to African letters, rendering into English and in one volume, a rare and vibrant diversity of voices from a country oft ignored in continental letters. It holds all the lyricism, haunted echoes, and lament and praise song that you know can only come from a people whose search for the sublime was not limited to mountain churches, but to churches carved deep into the search, the complete scale of the human, from the body to the highest soul. I am grateful for this work and cannot recommend it enough. I hope the voices held here find expressions in their own collections soon'
Chris Abani, Judge, 2021 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry

'Chris Beckett and Alemu Tebeje's anthology of Ethiopian Amharic poetry is wonderful - not only for the choice of poems - but for the fluency and energy of the translations. The editors are also to be congratulated for their cogent introduction and context to Ethiopian poetry.'
Katrina Naomi, Modern Poetry in Translation