The book is out of print.
Emmanuel Ngara's Ideology and Form in African Poetry is a single, sustained and economically-presented argument, whose underlying project is to investigate the relationship between ideology, form and aesthetic effect in African poetry. His position is a clearly-formulated Marxist one, committed to the evaluation and discrimination of poetry in terms of its social consequences.
It is certainly worth reading and keeping on the shelf, not because it succeeds in doing what Ngara sets out to do but because, along the way to its unsuccessful conclusion, it provides excellent readings of some poems, organizes poets and poems into some useful categories, raises important issues, and demonstrates the limits of one ideological paradigm as a tool for the analysis of poetry. - Thomas R. Knipp, Research in African Literatures
