Tenderfoot

A Tenderfoot is a novice, someone unaccustomed to hardship. Here, he is a white boy growing up in 1960s Ethiopia, a place he loves even as he learns his own privilege and foreignness. Later he hears rumours of a famine in the mountains and imagines a boy his own age living through it, surviving on angry couplets. Years after, he sees this famine-boy grown up and questions him.

A sequel to Ethiopia Boy, Beckett's celebrated first Carcanet collection, Tenderfoot teems with praise-shouts for Asfaw the cook, for the boys living as minibus conductors or chewing-gum sellers, even for Tenderfoot's own stomach that hangs 'like a leopard in a thorn acacia tree'. Featuring storms and droughts, hunger and desire, donkeys who quote Samuel Johnson and a red bicycle that invites you on a poem tour of Addis Ababa, Tenderfoot takes in what is happening around but also inside the boy's mind and body - a human transformation.



Chris Beckett was born in London but grew up in Ethiopia in the 1960s. His first Carcanet collection, Ethiopia Boy (Carcanet/Oxford Poets, 2013), was described by Julian Stannard in Poetry Review as 'a series of dazzling vignettes... a love letter to the country and his childhood friend, Abebe'. His translations of contemporary Ethiopian poets have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, PN Review, The Missing Slate and Asymptote Journal. With Alemu Tebeje, he translated and edited Songs We Learn from Trees, the first ever anthology of Ethiopian Amharic poetry in English, published by Carcanet in May 2020. Sketches from the Poem Road (after Matsuo Basho's The Narrow Road to the Deep North), a collaboration with his partner, the Japanese painter and sculptor Isao Miura, was published by Hagi Press in 2015 and shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. He is a trustee of the Anglo-Ethiopian Society and the Poetry Society.