Review: ELEPHANT CAKE WALK by Andrew Oerke (Africa staff)
Elephant Cake Walk (Africa Poems) by Andrew Oerke ( (PCstaff: Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Jamaica 1966-71) Poets’ Choice Publishing, 2017 94 pages $19.95 (paperback) Reviewed by Ann Neelon (Senegal 1978-79) • I distinctly remember coming home from work especially dispirited one day 15 or so years ago. As a newly minted associate professor, I was in my “winning tenure, losing the thrill” phase, to quote a headline from The New York Times that stuck with me at the time. Strangely, I began to hear something resembling African percussion as I extricated myself from the car. I glanced up into our maple tree. There were our two young sons, perched in its branches, sporting an eclectic mix of Senegalese, Ivoirian and Moroccan costume elements from the Peace Corps boxes in our attic, including pointed “el hadji” shoes (which must have substantially ramped up the difficulty of the climb). Somehow, our . . .
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for those of us who did know Andy (I was Malawi PCV 68-70), who was both a former Golden Gloves…