Chiperoni: term for a kind of fog, drizzle rain, experienced in the Shire Highlands of southern Malawi during the cold, dry season; name derived from Mount Chiperone, an isolated mountain peak at the southern extremity of East African mountain ranges, covered with montane forests and surrounded by deciduous woodlands.
Adèle Ogiér Jones has lived and worked in Malawi over different periods since 2007. Poems in Counting the Chiperoni were written between 2017 and 2018. They are grouped in three sections, opening with those related to ‘chiperoni’, the weather phenomenon coming from Mozambique, affecting Malawi’s southern Shire Highlands around Blantyre. Then ‘bush and plantation’ includes poems on changing land use; followed by the longest part of the collection ‘and its people’, which moves between local people’s memories rewritten here as poems, and the poet’s own reflections on present-day life, work, and customs affected by environmental and economic changes.
