An introduction to Starfish Blossoms

In the garden of my childhood home was a neglected rockery, haunt of snakes and lizards, where my mother grew aloes and other drought-resistant succulents. I remember the fluted grey-green stems of stapelia sprawling across the arid, dusty soil between the rocks. For much of the year these plants seemed to be struggling to survive, until the onset of the rainy season when they burst into flower. We wrinkled our noses at their unpleasant smell but admired the gaudy resilience of their starfish-shaped blossoms.  

Resilience – in particular, the resilience of women – is at the heart of this gloriously vibrant collection. In beautifully observed portrayals, Samantha Vazhure introduces us to the women who have shaped her life: her paternal grandmother, ‘riddled with sugar blindness’, sitting on her reed mat in the moonlight; her maternal grandmother who ‘hands [her] fifty cents for crumbs’; her mother, appearing in a dream, ‘Afro glowing like a golden halo’; her daughter who unwittingly teaches her a profound life lesson; and Fatima,

my other mother in her burgundy-

cream ditsy dress, georgette drop-waist over her dark & skinny form, red

beret perched on curly permed hair overlooking aviators hung high on her

powdered face with cheekbones blushed & best of all—stout scarlet lips

always curved skyward, spitting bold words, kissing my wounds better.

Vazhure guides us through the complexity of human relationships, deftly navigating between memories and dreamscapes, vivid narratives and internal dialogues, tumultuous physical encounters, and quiet contemplation. The emotional register is wide-ranging. Love, grief, betrayal, desire and suffering are unflinchingly laid bare in richly textured poems with striking use of sensory imagery. We smile at the humorous disconnect between expectation and reality in the first taste of ‘Italian pie’; ponder the nature of home and belonging; share the aching tenderness of motherhood, its yearnings and ambitions. 

Vazhure’s voice is polyphonic and assured, interweaving mellifluous English cadences with reverberant Shona rhythms. Many of the poems find inspiration in the Zimbabwean landscape, as in ‘God's creatures and rivers’, with its vivid images of ‘termites foraging on rich red crystalline soil’ and ‘rivers flowing amidst baobab, marula & mopane trees’. 

‘One by one rib stitch’, draws us in with its skilful crafting and meditative sensuality:

How else can I love you when I can’t be

there to show you? If I knit you a scarf in

chunky indigo, would it warm you like the

joy that radiates from my heart when I

contemplate how much you love me?

By contrast, ‘Kissing with flies’ is an anguished questioning when confronted with the corpse of ‘the pregnant woman found too late/ in the woods’, her life destroyed by hypocrisy and betrayal. The poem ends defiantly:

may you learn your value

is not defined by a man who cheats

Death is a recurrent, at times ambivalent, presence in these pages, a reminder of ‘the brevity and fragility of life’. Ultimately, Vazhure invites us to celebrate rather than to grieve. The final poem is a soaring hymn to the invincibility of the human spirit and the enduring power of the written word. 

Read this collection. You are in for a treat.

~Marian Christie, poet & essayist

The Mire

is a series of fiction novels set between post-colonial Zimbabwe and the UK, exploring an intergenerational legacy of trauma, narrated in first person through the eyes of Ruva, a 1st generation immigrant living in the UK. In this series, Vazhure relentlessly explores the complexities of culture, religion and society within a dysfunctional family set up.