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Douglas Oliver died in Paris earlier this year. A poet who was never really acknowledged in this country, despite being published by Paladin and Penguin, he dared to take chances and think ambitiously. One of his books, Penniless Politics, imagined a new political consciousness, one which referred to existing political parties and ideas as no longer useful and able to solve problems, and if its message seemed rather woolly, as it did to me, it at least tried to break away from current conventions in both politics and poetry. Oliver had a faith in the possibility of change which could be deeply moving, even when one was doubtful about it actually happening.

     A Salvo for Africa was published just before Oliver died and, again, it aimed for depth, this time in a mixture of poetry and prose dealing with conditions in Africa and the need for those of us in the West to understand them and do something practical to help resolve the vast difficulties facing the continent. To do this Oliver moved his narrative “partly geographically, partly historically, and partly thematically across Africa”, though without suggesting any sort of “prescription, free-market or interventionist”, to cure the ills. He saw them as too varied and complex for any one solution to work. What he did focus on, though, were the massive debts owed by African nations and the way in which World Bank/ IMF conditions are imposed on countries hardly prepared for them. “Indigenous peoples should decide their own future,” he said, and the West should help but not to the extent of insisting on a single method of arriving at the future.

     Having considered what Oliver was trying to do politically it’s reasonable to ask how his book works poetically. The prose is sometimes of a journalistic kind, quoting facts and figures, though it does also refer to personal experiences. When Oliver moves into poetry the writing is direct and clear - “my more avant-garde styles are not appropriate here”, he said - and concerned to alert readers to the personal elements, as well as the politics, of the African situation. And to forestal the usual comments, often heard in Britain, that poetry changes nothing or adds little to what the prose tells us, he suggested that “a poem can re-imagine a dulled-over political issue for us, making it lively”.

     I found A Salvo for Africa to be immensely readable and effective in the way that it blends poetry and prose. Douglas Oliver also managed to steer clear of naive and simplistic commentary. As he put it: “Poets become foolish when they suggest amateurish solutions to mighty problems; they become exploitative if they parade their compassion; and if they sneer at politicians’ difficulties from safe avant-garde margins that’s rather despicable.” He wrote a brave book and it ought to be read.