CHINUA Achebe is best known as a novelist. He however finds poetry a means of expressing his distress and innermost feelings. The novelist won the First Commonwealth Poetry Prize with Beware Soul Brother.

That book written during the Nigerian Civil War was published about 32 years ago. The collection had few poems that directly reflected the war. Other poetry works from Achebe include Christmas at Biafra and Other Poems 1973; Don't Let Him Die: An Anthology of Memorial Poems for Christopher Okigbo. He edited this with Dubem Okafor in 1978. In 1982, he edited Aka Weta: An Anthology of Igbo Poetry.

But Achebe has a new poetry book, and this is authoritative. Entitled: New Book of Poetry, the book is scheduled for release later this year or early next year. The publishers will be Simon and Schuster of New York.

In this compilation the writer expresses his distress in an exquisite, brilliant and illuminating Achebean style. The poems cover the spectrum of politics, poverty, war, justice, racial tolerance. It strives to explore the complexity, diversity and human dimensions of a place called Africa.

A message from the publishers sent to The Guardian explains that "in scope, the poetry collection is very ambitious as it encompasses the writer's almost entire poetic output over the past 40 years. It contains classic poems from the aforementioned collection Beware Soul Brother such as Vultures, Refugee Mother and Child and Beware Soul Brother."

The book includes newer poems such as Knowing Robs US and Butterfly.

"Butterfly is a particularly powerful poem that examines the excess of force. The writer uses excess here to mean wealth (and thus comfort). The driver as depicted in the poem, is comfortable, speeding along the highway, protected by the product of his knowledge, going somewhere (where?) and occupying a man-made space.

"The butterfly, however, meandering towards the sunlight, directionless, exists within a natural one. The contrast of forces is between man as technological and the butterfly as biological entities. The butterfly is blessed. The driver, fallen from grace, violent. Sacrifice usually means transfiguration - grace overcoming violence and death. Not in this case. They meet at the crossroads, a pastoral image and typically African location for business, exchange - perhaps therefore politics."

The poem is also interpreted as the comfortable violence of the oppressor. The new poetry collection from Achebe includes several brand new or never published pieces such as 1969 as well as tributes to Christopher Okigbo Wake for Okigbo and Augustino Neto and others.

In this new collection, Achebe strives to create a view of present day Africa that moves beyond the stereotypes. It is a celebration of style, substance and poetic vision and a masterful toure de force.

Regarded as the first African writer to win broad critical acclaim in Europe and America and the most widely read African novelist, Chinua Achebe has shaped the world's understanding of Africa and its literature.

Born in Anambra State on November 16, 1930 to Isaiah and Janet Achebe, he was named Albert Chinualamogu. Isaiah Okafor Achebe was a catechist for the Church Missionary Society, and he and his wife travelled Eastern Nigeria as evangelists before settling in Ogidi, Isaiah's ancestral village, five years after Chinua Achebe's birth. Growing up in Ogidi, Achebe had contact with both Christian and Igbo religious beliefs and customs.

Achebe's first lessons were taught in Igbo at the church school in Ogidi. He began to learn English at the age of eight. An avid reader and an outstanding student, Achebe was selected at 14 to attend Government College, a highly selective secondary school in Umuahia, where one of his classmates was the poet Christopher Okigbo.

Upon graduation, Achebe accepted a scholarship to study medicine at University College in lbadan, but after one year decided to switch to the study of English literature, forfeiting his scholarship. With the financial assistance of his older brother John, he was able to continue his studies.

Achebe and the playwright Wole Soyinka, who were to become Nigeria's best known authors, were undergraduates together at University College and published their first work in undergraduate publications. Polar Undergraduate (1950), a satire of student behaviour that was later collected in Girls at War and Other Stories (1972), was Achebe's first published fiction.

In his third year, Achebe became editor of the University Herald. After his graduation in 1953, he took a position as Talks Producer for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC).

In 1958, Achebe published Things Fall Apart which won him the Margaret Wrong Memorial Prize for the novel's contribution to African literature. In 1960, the year of Nigeria's independence, he published No Longer at Ease and was awarded the Nigerian National Trophy for Literature. Achebe spent the remainder of 1960 and part of 1961 travelling through East Africa, interviewing other African writers. After his return to Nigeria, he married Christie Chinwe Okoli, with whom he was to have four children, and was appointed Director of External Broadcasting for NBC.

In 1962, Achebe became the founding editor of Heinemann's African Writers Series, and in 1963, he travelled to the United States, Brazil, and Britain on a UNESCO fellowship. He published Arrow of God in 1964 and was honoured with the Jack Campbell New Statesman Award for his accomplishment. His publication of the prophetic A Man of the People (1966) was followed by successive military coups, massacres of Igbos, and the secession of Biafra in 1967.

Achebe was forced to leave Lagos after the second coup, and during the Nigerian Civil War (1967-70) he became a spokesperson for the Biafran cause in Europe and North America. He also served as a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka which was renamed the University of Biafra during the war.

In 1987, Achebe published his first novel in 20 years, Anthills of the Savannah(1987) and returned to teach in the United States at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, the City College of New York, and Bard College. In 1988, he published Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, 1965-87, and in 2002, Home and Exile, also a collection of essays.