IT is a quarter of a century since the poet, human rights activist and former political prisoner Jack Mapanje came to live in York with his family.

He was fresh out of a Malawian jail, where he'd been forced to spend three years, seven months, 16 days and more than 12 hours as the 'guest' of Malawi's then 'President for Life', Hastings Banda.

That 'more than 12 hours' is a phrase Jack repeats several times in And Crocodiles Are Hungry At Night, his extraordinary 2011 biography which tells the story of his imprisonment, and his years in the hellhole that was Malawi's notorious Mikuyu Maximum Detention Centre.

It's typical of the sense of humour that got him through those years in prison.

"We used every trick in the book to survive, and the biggest was laughter," he told The Press in an interview in 2004.

That humour - wry, precise and sharp-edged - is back in his latest volume of poetry, Greetings From Grandpa. It is accompanied by a sense of anger at the despotism that still oppresses the lives of so many in Africa - and also by an exile's sense of longing for a home irretrievably changed from the continent of his childhood.

There's also a cool-headed acknowledgement that the West, which gave Jack and his family sanctuary, is far from perfect.

All of this, and much more besides, is captured in just a few lines of 'Imagining Home', the very first poem in Greetings From Grandpa.

York Press:

"If they should ask how you lasted for so long wandering in alien lands after your country of birth had spewed you out of her belly... tell them some true truths," Jack writes.

"In the land of the free the lakes are cold, there are no hippos, no crocodiles, few rabbits race up the craggy hills; you were a mere tenant on the tobacco farms of invisible global despots: they reap most from their toil those who bend backwards the furthest; but you were delighted for the shelter, for genuine friendships too, though often you still pined for the purple jacarandas, the dry earthy dust of home..."

There's so much there in those 'true truths'. An exile's hurt at being rejected by the land that gave him birth; a sense of being forever a stranger in the 'alien land' that took him in, where the lakes are cold and there are no hippos; gratitude for the shelter and friendship he found here; but a recognition, too, that there is much wrong in the West, where the global despots of capitalism treat the rest like tenants.

Sometimes it takes an exile - someone thrust out of the comfort of familiar surroundings - to be able to articulate all these things.

Jack, a visiting professor in the Faculty of Art at York St John University, has been doing so for half a lifetime.

Greetings From Grandpa, his sixth volume of poetry, is full of true truths, some uncomfortable. In 'This TV Death So Mean' he writes about the appalling death of Libyan dictator Col Gaddafi (though he never names him), which was captured on video and broadcast around the world.

"Did we really need to watch the brute writhing, gasping, the spirit squeezed out of his sewage-crushed body?" he writes.

This isn't comfortable poetry. It's tough and terse and often angry.

But it is powerful, too, and often richly, exotically beautiful, leaping and bounding with the rhythms of Jack's native Africa. Highly recommended.

  • Greetings From Grandpa by Jack Mapanje is published by Bloodaxe, priced £9.95