All Books
For archive material, see the Reviews, Interviews, Articles, and Other Links listed for each book and author.
Showing all 13 results Bloodred Dragonflies, a selection from three decades of his writing, is Jim Pascual Agustin’s first book published in South Africa. It includes new poems and some recently translated versions of poems from the Filipino. Constructed from subtle images, close observations of nature and refracted memories, Agustin’s poems express an innocence that has survived the most difficult conditions. * The work of Agustin is notable for its intense imagery. He is economical with words, never going past that which is necessary for a fulfilling experience […] There is an observant quality to the poems. Whether writing about various insects or family life or the downtrodden, the poet’s power is in his descriptive ability. Bloodred Dragonflies is a book that documents not only the breaking down but also the rebuilding of a life that can change for better, or worse, in an instant. – Sihle Ntuli, Botsotso Literary Journal Robert Berold’s All the Days is his fourth collection of poetry. The collection evinces all the characteristics of Berold’s trademark voice, so tellingly brought together in his last collection, Rain Across a Paper Field – his refined simplicity, his focus upon sharply defined and evocative imagery, a preoccupation with the natural world and the impermanence of the human – but here in this new book he pushes these elements further and deeper; both more deeply personal and less emotional at one and the same time.
– Kobus Moolman, New Coin All the Days reaches further and sings more clearly than his earlier work. The reader will be struck by the spare lucidity of the language, the elemental sense of place – and the way love in the end gets the better of difficulty. – Denis Hirson Poetry 99: Twenty South African Poets in Performance In 1996, 1998 and 1999 Robert Berold, then editor of New Coin, organised readings and performance festivals at the National Arts Festival held in July. The 1996 readings were recorded and issued on cassette tape as New Coin Live. The 1998 performances were issued on VHS tape as Jikaleza Train, with the text of the performances published in the New Coin June 1999 issue. The 1999 performances were more professionally filmed. The twenty poets who participated were: Financial constraints delayed the film editing, and the edited DVD and book was only issued 14 years later, in 2013. The urgency of the 1999 event was still there, as vital as ever. Mxolisi Nyezwa wrote in his introduction to the book: “There’s little of the earlier hunger and urgency in our poetry now. Today’s poets are not angry enough. They are as disconnected as the rest of our pliable society.” Click on ‘Read Excerpts’ for a list of Contents and Introduction Bilakhulu! is a book of seven poems varying in length from three pages to over 30 pages. They are narrative poems, politically outspoken yet personal, buoyant with vitality and humour. Though immersed in the poet’s rural village and the marginalised communities of South Africa’s cities, they embrace the wider world. Vonani Bila has written: ‘I believe in poetry’s ability to cut across frontiers. It transmits its poison or honey to readers or potential readers in aeroplanes, airconditioned university lecture rooms, mansions, hotel en suites and to their children who roam around our colossal shopping malls. Poetry’s readers may also be found in barbershops, spaza shops, or village schools somewhere in Limpopo, or under trees, in hair and beauty salons, in taxis and bus stations, taverns, churches, stokvels, threadbare soccer fields, or jazz pubs.’ KwaNobuhle Overcast is a book of vivid observations of Billie’s community 20 years into South Africa’s democracy. It describes an inhospitable and sometimes callous KwaNobuhle, its spirit worn away by the harsh toll of survival and political betrayal. The poet remains rooted, borne up by love, family, jazz music, and a stubborn belief in humanity. In simple vocabulary a naked bone describes complex states of beauty and suffering, often at the borderline where life meets death. In their dreamlike rhythms and images, the poems draw strength from Xhosa culture, Christianity and elements of nature. They are love poems in the widest sense, embracing the interface between daily life and the spiritual, enacting joy and caring in the face of deprivation and mourning. Lament for Kofifi Macu, Angifi Dladla’s second book of poems in English, was published in 2017, sixteen years after his first collection. The book shows Dladla making use of a wide range of forms, from lyrical to closely observed portraits, from elegiac to satirical, as well as poems inhabiting the African spirit realm. His poetic voice, always clear and memorable, varies from poem to poem: at times public or bardic in tone, at times intimate and tender, at other times bitter with accusation. * Lament for Kofifi Macu is Angifi Dladla’s second collection of poems in English and the title poem, which narrates the searing yearning of a young girl who longs for the return of Kofifi – an activist murdered by his handlers in exile – signals some of the central themes and stylistic devices in the book. The “lament” is not just the girl’s, but also the poet’s – for himself, and for those the poet speaks for in these poems, whom he calls the “double-wounded”, those betrayed by the new political and business elite post-1994. ‘Almighty Father,/ Healer of the double-wounded,/ hold this hand – charred/ in this freezing freedom’, the poet writes in “Prayer of the Wounded”. Dladla draws on different poetic forms and techniques – narrative, lyrical, eulogy, free verse, the impressive use of identical rhyme, the litany of praise poetry etc. – with frequent shifts in register, and in implied reader or audience, sometimes within the same poem. – Alan Finlay The girl who then feared to sleep is Angifi Dladla’s first book of poems in English. In an imagistic voice, Dladla looks back to the last decades of apartheid, including the violent states of Emergency and the necklace killings by township ‘comrades’. Alongside these upheavals are poignant poems of dreams, childhood, family and the school where he taught at the time. * Dladla has a great capacity to live with uncertainty and pain, and his poems reflect this. He is one of the few South African poets prepared to engage fully with the trauma of violence and apartheid in a direct descriptive way, while remaining open to the vulnerability as well as the possibility of the present. This openness allows him to redefine his relationship to both past and present. His awareness of the true violence and tension of post-apartheid society is liberating […] For him, revolution begins with a turbulent but necessary journey of self-discovery, encompassing introspection, dreams and heightened consciousness. – Kyle Allen That kind of door, Finlay’s fifth collection, is a narrative of linked poems. A man loves a woman who lives on one continent and is a devoted father to his two sons who live on another – a situation that finds him sometimes in unbearable anguish. That kind of door describes his life in a lyrical sequence of taut musicality and precise imagery. * Broken lines, incomplete sentences, voices trailing off – That kind of door voices in its forms how attempts at kindness can be blundering. How we wish that best intentions would be sufficient. […] That kind of door points to the silences inside us, reaching, yearning towards the outer and inner borders between people and within ourselves. – Marike Beyers, New Coin otherwise you well? a selection of Richard Fox’s poems written over 10 years, confronts the way predatory capitalism and its digital culture is cauterising humanity and nature. With taut momentum and often fierce humour, these poems describe the 21st-century predicament in a way that is both graphic and austere. In between, in a gentler style, are lyric poems of painful insight. And in between those, a very South African road trip. * Without any of the predictable doomsday warnings or linear unfolding, there is a frenetic energy moving through [this poem] which mirrors so well the way our overstimulated brains scamper in multiple directions in an attempt to make sense of these turbulent times […] The visual and visceral assaults are relentless to the point of that very feeling untethered that this poem ‘embodies’. – Malika Ndlovu, judge of New Coin Poetry Prize 2021 A woman reluctantly takes on the responsibility of putting her eccentric rebellious mother into a retirement home, and managing her care. She has her own daughter to raise and nurture, a marriage and a business to hold together, and her own psychological troubles due in good part to how she was mothered. my mother, my madness is Colleen Higgs’s diary of her mother’s last 10 years. It is at once funny, harrowing, mundane, chaotic, and full of insight – a rich and moving story which unfolds through its characters like a novel. * It takes courage to be truthful about the frightfulness of a parent, but Higgs writes with frankness and the tale is tender and compelling. […] Her insight and resoluteness are admirable. – Michele Magwood In the Heat of Shadows: South African Poetry 1996-2013 brings together work by 32 poets, and includes translations from Afrikaans, isiXhosa, isiZulu, Sesotho and Xitsonga. This anthology follows on from Denis Hirson’s 1997 anthology The Lava of this Land: South African Poetry 1960-1996. Denis Hirson writes in his introduction: ‘Anyone who followed the development of South African poetry through the darkest of the apartheid years, and was aware of its constantly recurring themes of guilt and victimization, rage and denial, identity and dispossession, might be surprised by its current reach and range. […] Gone is the intense inward focus required to deal with a situation of systematic oppression, though awareness of that time continues to surface sharply. Gone is the overriding, enclosing effort of concentration on a single predicament. Instead, the reader will discover outward reaching poems that record movement through time and space, experiments in language and translation, alongside enduring touchstones such as love and loss, memory and acts of witnessing. Faced with this rich array of work, I have made out of it a collage of many dimensions, rather than doggedly trying to pursue specific themes or approaches.’ Poems by: Call it a difficult night is a story about madness. Using anecdotes, poems, dialogue, and fragments of historical research, it follows a nonlinear path in tracing the life of its narrator/protagonist. Institutionalised after a ‘final break’, a young woman remembers in sharp detail disturbing childhood visions, which had become overwhelming by the time she was at school and university. When she finally gets a diagnosis – temporal lobe epilepsy – a doctor explains that she is likely to be either demented or brain dead by the time she is 30. Set mainly during her short spell in the mental hospital, the story proceeds through encounters with nurses, doctors, other patients and also the friends who visit her – many of them frightened by her state of mind. These encounters, painful but quite often funny, take us deeper into the feelings of the narrator and further into the workings of a mental health system which generates definitions of madness. She is defiant in her noncompliance and deeply suspicious of her treatment. She is sure that her hallucinations, dangerous and terrifying as they are, are preferable to the dulling effects of her medication and its theft of her creativity.
Bloodred Dragonflies
R160.00
Jim Pascual Agustin
All the Days
R120.00
Robert Berold
Poetry99
R160.00
Robert Berold (ed.)
Edited by Robert Berold
Co-published by Deep South and Timbila
Robert Berold ~ Vonani Bila ~ Ingrid De Kok ~ Alan Finlay ~ Richard Fox ~ Louise Green ~ Colleen Higgs ~ Allan Kolski Horwitz ~ Nosipho Kota ~ Jethro Louw ~ Joan Metelerkamp ~ Isabella Motadinyane ~ Ike Muila ~ Siphiwe ka Ngwenya ~ Mxolisi Nyezwa ~ Donald Parenzee ~ Lesego Rampolokeng ~ Dudu Saki ~ Kelwyn Sole ~ Anna Varney.
Bilakhulu!
R160.00
Vonani Bila
KwaNobuhle Overcast
R120.00
Ayanda Billie
A Naked Bone
R120.00
Mangaliso Buzani
Lament for Kofifi Macu
R160.00
Angifi Dladla
The girl who then feared to sleep
R120.00
Angifi Dladla
That kind of door
R120.00
Alan Finlay
otherwise you well?
R120.00
Richard Fox
on Fox’s poem “Animal Mind is Tripping”
my mother, my madness
R220.00
Colleen Higgs
In the Heat of Shadows
R180.00
Denis Hirson (Ed.)
Jim Pascual Agustin ~ Gabeba Baderoon ~ Robert Berold ~ Vonani Bila ~ Jeremy Cronin ~ Ingrid de Kok ~ Isobel Dixon ~ Finuala Dowling ~ Khadija Tracey Heeger ~ Denis Hirson ~ Ronelda Kamfer ~ Keorapetse Kgositsile ~ Katharine Kilalea ~ Rustum Kozain ~ Antjie Krog ~ David wa Maahlamela ~ Bongekile Joyce Mbanjwa ~ Joan Metelerkamp ~ Kobus Moolman ~ Isabella Motadinyane ~ Petra Müller ~ Gert Vlok Nel ~ Mxolisi Nyezwa ~ Karen Press ~ Mongane Wally Serote ~ Ari Sitas ~ Kelwyn Sole ~ Rosamund Stanford ~ Toni Stuart ~ Nathan Trantraal ~ Marlene van Niekerk ~ Bulelani Zantsi.
Call it a difficult night
R220.00
Mishka Hoosen
Call it a difficult night is a novel brimming with empathy, observation and lyricism, by an author who has the capacity to describe great joy and great suffering.
Showing all 15 results The poems in Scrim have a taut musicality which is enhanced by their arrangement on the page. Precise in language and feeling, yet aware of the uncontrollability of language, they re-make the familiar in new and striking ways. * The exquisite and seemingly fragile beauty of these poems sits side-by-side with their intellectual and conceptual strength. In reading them I was continually surprised by the unexpected directions the poems took me: in a very real sense, the best of them embodied one poem’s injunction to “Look. Everything is always about to happen.” – Kelwyn Sole, New Coin geruisloos, ongemerk is ’n aangrypende kortverhaalbundel wat stilisties tussen voorstedelike-realisme en surrealisme wissel. Kuit ondersoek die alledaagse lewe met onverwagte ompaaie, woede en humor. * Henali Kuit se kortverhaalbundel word op verskeie platforms beskryf as ’n uitlokkende versameling van kortverhale wat wissel tussen realisme en surrealisme. [… Sy] het in ’n onderhoud met LitNet in 2012 vertel dat haar gunstelingtipe stories die “skynbare banale stories” is. Alledaagse stories oor wat iemand alleen in ’n kantoor aanvang of oor hoe iemand per ongeluk hulle hare met conditioner in plaas van sjampoe was. Kuit het egter gebieg dat sy nie genoeg vaardigheid het om hierdie stories te vertel nie – en tog het sy dit reggekry om hierdie tipe stories in haar kortverhaalbundels te bemeester. – Irene Schoonwinkel, LitNet The incredible beat of my heart is a provocative collection of short prose, varying in style from suburban-realist to surrealist. Kuit transmits the elusive strangeness of daily life in a deceptively matter-of-fact tone, spiked with bursts of rage, humour, and unmarked detours. Although most of the stories are no more than three pages long, this slim, 95-page volume is not a book I gobbled up in one sitting. Partly because I wanted to savour the choppy, discordant sentences, and their curious but satisfying endings. Partly because – in spite of the quirky humour – a feeling of bleakness, isolation and disconnection accumulates. […] I marvelled at how Kuit’s serrated gems are paradoxically stripped of and yet saturated with emotion. The musicality and rhythms of some lines stayed with me like song lyrics: “I carried your oxygen because you loved me. I’m not stupid. These are the facts. Our hearts in our suits, loving each other in the soundless liquid black of space. Two bowls of noodles twisting and squelching in warm bowls of blood.” – Jo-Ann Bekker, New Contrast After Troy, Taban lo Liyong’s book length poem, is an expansive and engaging elaboration of two classical Greek texts, Homer’s Odyssey and Aeschylus’s Oresteia. The poem is ultimately a philosophical enquiry into retribution and justice. Its focus is the homecoming from the Trojan war of two hero-kings, Odysseus and Agamemnon. In a sequence of poetic monologues, lo Liyong recreates their thoughts and speech, introducing dialogue from other characters, most of them women, who are not given a voice in the ancient texts. * Always light-hearted and yet philosophical, Taban lo Liyong’s poetry flows effortlessly, [opening] technical and thematic frontiers that energise the modern African poetic tradition. Lo Liyong’s poetry is a fresh harvest of wit, humour, and wordplay that any reader will feel happy to indulge in. – Tanure Ojaide i lost a poem is a book of deeply felt lyrics, expressed in straightforward language. The poems describe the violence and bleakness of prison life, but also explore love, sexuality and religious feeling. * The simplicity of the language that he uses and his ability to draw deeply from his everyday life is enviable. […] There is hardly a misspent word in any of the poems. Writing with such economy is an accomplishment for a first volume. – Andrew Martin, Wordstock Requiem is a book-length poem written after the suicide of the poet’s mother, and against the current of catholic masculine authority – it loosely follows the structure of a requiem mass, not allowed by the Catholic church for suicides. The poem attempts to answer fundamental questions: What impels a person to live or die, and how free are we to decide? How are the threads of love, mothering and family woven into and through belief or faith in the present moment? How do survivors find sufficient solace to carry on? * A daughter somehow has to pick up the pieces of her own life and come to terms with her mother’s legacy. How does a poet do this? She writes. And this poet doesn’t write floridly or introspectively; she writes as if life and death depended on it. […] She cries. She protests. She remembers. She acknowledges the pain of unfinished conversations and regrets. And she holds on for dear life. – John Forbis Under dark under branches, Joan Metelerkamp’s tenth collection, continues the explorations of her recent book-length poems, opening out to five generations of family history and the wider context of national history. The assured music of the writing carries dialogues, lyrical passages, and fragments of narrative. Five years after leaving South Africa, the poet mourns the torn-out roots of her life – her community, environment and ancestors left behind in a country no longer her home. A Book of Rooms deepens Kobus Moolman’s explorations in Light and After and Left Over, retaining the same Beckett-like sparseness and doggedness of those books, but in the form of a realist-biographical narrative. Organised in physically dense scenes labelled ‘rooms’, it inhabits the childhood and young adulthood of a man with a serious physical disability growing up in a grim family environment on the white side of apartheid in its final years. The reader is drawn immediately into the narrator’s meetings with pain and failure, and beneath these, his will to live, his sharp flashes of humour, and his need to know the truth. * Working through a Moolman volume is both a rewarding and exhausting experience … However in a country where poems are too often simply sound-bytes for fleeting perceptions and states of mind, […] Moolman moves into a different space entirely, and has taken a much more difficult and honest path. The reader will emerge from this poetry chastened but delighted. They are works of acumen, depth and extraordinary pressure. – Kelwyn Sole, New Coin Deeper and richer than before, Kobus Moolman’s voice in the poem cycle Light and After gathers strength to climax in the third section Anatomy. Sometimes terse and astringent, sometimes luxurious, the poems are always specific, rooted in the cycles of earth and body. This is a beautiful work, distinctively South African in its imagery and diction. – Joan Metelerkamp The reader is constantly located in the artist’s body negotiating between the physical space of bricks and mortar, and the inner, imagined reality which is a shifting, unreliable space… The highlight of this collection is the third section, titled ‘Anatomy’ … an extended meditation on the body as the place of fragmentation and reconnection, depersonalisation and reintegration…
– Liesl Jobson, FMR Book Choice Complete Poems is Isabella Motadinyane’s collected work: just over 30 poems. It was first published as Bella in 2007 by Botsotso Publishing in an illustrated edition, and was republished by Deep South without illustrations. The six Sesotho poems and the Sesotho phrases scattered in other poems were newly translated by Lesego Rampolokeng. * Reading Isabella Motadinyane’s collected poems feels like more than holding a gem in your hands. It feels like tasting the vibrant-wounded-hopeful, s’camtho mesh of Jo’burg in the 90s […] They introduce the reader to the many voices that are Isabella: a fiery funny woman from Soweto who could hold her own in male-dominated spaces, and a fragile feminine woman who refused to allow her own physical ailments to break her […] This book of collected poems is a beautiful tribute to an otherwise forgotten South African voice. And to an important vibrant time in the history of South African literature, before the wave of Def Poetry and slam Americanism influences. – Vangile Gantsho, New Coin The collection follows a careful, subtle sequence. Opening poems set up the fundamentals of Motsapi’s aesthetic-political concerns (social conflict, black poverty, the values of humbleness, love, hope). Then the journey begins, starting with an exploration of black music as a privileged metaphor of contemporary black identity, assessing concomitantly the forces of cultural amnesia and residual heritage at work in musical production. The collection then moves on to a consideration of political and spiritual expressions of power, in both local and global dimensions, juxtaposing exploitative and regenerative versions of this power. The book ends by detailing the project of emancipation’s journey, the formation of a collective black liberatory subject, an affirmation of hope and the inevitability of triumph; a journey which holistically integrates the political, physical, cultural and spiritual themes of earlier sections into the vision of an organic consciousness-in-process. […] All in all, an extremely exciting, multiply resonant and freshly original collection; a highly valuable contribution to new imaginings for a new country. – Laura Chrisman, New Coin ten flapping elbows, mama is a poem series composed of several different elements, styles and voices, and its concern is mainly (though not solely) with being black in South Africa in the 10 years of transition since the 1994 elections. Nxumalo writes: ‘I have tried to be […] aware of style and form all the time, especially when trying to make language do new things. In what I call psycho-narration, I try to write beyond the understanding that the “inside of one’s head” and “the objective world” are really distinct worlds. This is a form I have grown to love more since I started preferring the long poem format that sits on a conversational tone. It’s a multi-vocal way of writing or telling stories in a less authoritative way, a kinda voice democracy in the poem.’ * [Nxumalo] wishes to occlude the distinction between “what’s reality out there and what’s inside my head,” constructing a mood of uncertainty around the conventional first person narrator of lyric poetry: in order that his poetry should become, in his words, “anti-lyrical,” and thus complicate reader’s relationship to the poems’ protagonists, particularly the first-person narrators. – Kelwyn Sole, Scrutiny2 Bhlawa’s Inconsolable Spirits is a startling, graphic, often humorous memoir, constructed from fragments of poetic prose. Determined to understand everything, the young Nyezwa turns to writing to ‘train himself to see’. In his vision no boundaries exist between imagination, day-to-day survival, spiritual reality and economic violence: ‘What everyone saw up there at night in Bhlawa, and called the moon, was just the hungry face of God.’ * Just as Mxolisi wanders the streets of Bhlawa experiencing the physical and spiritual worlds simultaneously, fully aware of the spirits surrounding him, Bhlawa’s Inconsolable Spirits is a beautifully poetic yet sometimes harrowing work in which optimism and pessimism, light and dark, comedy and tragedy, and life and death, exist side by side. – Gary Cummiskey, News24 Mxolisi Nyezwa’s poems are both violent and tender, with an immediacy of language that strikes the reader like a cry, or a note of music. Malikhanye is his third book of poems after Song Trials (2000) and New Country (2008). The book’s title comes from the extended lyrical sequence following the death of his infant son Malikhanye, a poem of great humility and beauty. * The climax is the sequence of poems “Malikhanye”, dedicated to his son, Malikhanye Nyezwa, who passed away at the age of three months. It is a work of haunting depth and tender irony, populated with startling images and intense juxtapositions. At its height it is the equal of Garcia Lorca’s “Elegy for Sancho Meijas”, and very reminiscent of Vallejo’s meditations on life and mortality and human suffering, full of probing and relentless reflections. – Kyle Allan, LitNet Heart’s Hunger spans thirty years of Karen Press’s writing, covering love poems, historical-political poems, lyrics, satires and poems of place. Press’s precise and generous poems illuminate her close observation of people, and the places that embrace or refuse them. Her latest book is The Loving and Lovable City (May Not Yet Be Here): An Atlas of the Cape Peninsula. * For more than thirty years, Karen Press’s poetry has held a mirror up to South Africa. In it, we have seen our shame and our (rarer) heroism, recognised our locales, acknowledged our history, mourned our dead and laughed at our foibles. Heart’s Hunger, a judicious selection from eight collections, is a welcome publication from a quietly distinguished poet who has avoided the limelight. What shines out is not a personality or, God forbid, a brand, but exquisitely precise diction, compassionate observation and imaginative power. To read Heart’s Hunger is not just to know where we have come from, but to feel in a very visceral way what it has meant, what it does mean, to have been born here. – Finuala Dowling (2024)
Scrim
R120.00
Haidee Kotze
geruisloos, ongemerk
R180.00
Henali Kuit
The incredible beat of my heart
R180.00
Henali Kuit
After Troy
R180.00
Taban lo Liyong
i lost a poem
R120.00
Mzwandile Matiwana
Requiem
R120.00
Joan Metelerkamp
Under dark under branches
R160.00
Joan Metelerkamp
A Book of Rooms
R120.00
Kobus Moolman
Light and After
R120.00
Kobus Moolman
Complete Poems
R120.00
Isabella Motadinyane
earthstepper/the ocean is very shallow
R120.00
Seitlhamo Motsapi
ten flapping elbows, mama
R120.00
Khulile Nxumalo
Bhlawa’s Inconsolable Spirits
R220.00
Mxolisi Nyezwa
Malikhanye
R120.00
Mxolisi Nyezwa
Heart’s Hunger: Selected Poems
R300.00
Karen Press
Showing all 12 results Originally published by Gecko Poetry in 1999 and republished 20 years later by Deep South, The Bavino Sermons includes such memorable poems as “Lines for Vincent”, “Riding the victim train”, “To Gil Scott-Heron”, “Crab attack”, “Rap Ranting” and “The Fela Sermon”, as well as some longer poems and prose fragments. * Passion drives this book. When the matrix of issues is the world we are in now/ yesterday/ the future, and the forecast is strewn with images of gore and madness, we laugh as well. If for some of us the idea of love’s physical gestures might be reduced to twinkling eroticism, Rampolokeng comes in and insists on the bland and blatant […] The Bavino Sermons are sermons of moral outrage. In their satellite eye-view and perspective of witness, the themes crisscross and happen all over… – Khulile and Sibusiso Nxumalo, reviewing the original 1999 edition Bird-Monk Seding, Rampolokeng’s third novel, is a stark picture of life in a rural township in the North West province, two decades into South Africa’s democracy. Listening and observing in the streets and taverns, narrator Bavino Sekete, often feeling desperate himself, is thrown back to his own violent childhood in Soweto. To get through, he turns to his pantheon of jazz innovators and radical writers. * There are new things in this book. The personal voice is not so relentlessly a voice of disgust as it has sometimes been. Though the shifts between affectionate memory and visceral horror still happen fast enough to feel like a punch in the guts, there are more of the former than there used to be. There’s nobility, fortitude and love in the lives of people such as Seding’s Pogisho and Mmaphefo, risking everything to protect their son. […] It declares it’s a novel. Believe it. – Gwen Ansell Head on Fire is Lesego Rampolokeng’s first book of poems to be published in South Africa since The Bavino Sermons in 1999. It includes the complete text of The Second Chapter, published in Berlin in 2003. * No contemporary South African poet – indeed, no writer – has occasioned more approval or disapproval, partly no doubt due to the confrontational nature of Rampolokeng’s poetic persona and style, and the scatological, irreverent content of much of his work. Eclectic and wide-ranging in his influences (these stretch all the way from the figure of the traditional praise poet to Sotho song forms, from rap to the Beats, from Lautreamont and Artaud to Cesaire and Mutabaruka), provocative – some would say apocalyptic – in his performance style and public pronouncements, unique in his varied usage of acoustic regimes and breath-phrasing, unusual in his line structures and his blurring of conventional syntax, his brand of rapped verse has got him, on occasion, into trouble… – Kelwyn Sole, Cross-Cultural Poetics Written between 1992 and 1997, whiteheart: prologue to hysteria is a nightmarish plunge into a 1970s Soweto childhood where violence waits everywhere to make its nest in the child-narrator’s mind. * The rap & rhyme intertwined with the vivid images cause your whole internal system to shiver. […] The words come at you like grotesque radical images straight into your imagination, making you very afraid excited educated & emancipated all at once. – Sonwabo Meyi, Wordstock skeptical erections is a book of startling visual and verbal imagination. Sapeta’s poems are short narratives of survival – his own and those of others. In a graphic language style, the book creates a world of mistrust and skepticism, tinged with humour. Despite their distortions and traumas, the characters are treated with respect and compassion. * Sapeta is an artist who sees, feels and puts to words as much as he expresses himself through painting. His often-short poems (quintain style) carry powerful imagery if not the dire conditions. In “dreams and heroes” he writes: “each day I am repeatedly told that it’s ok, that I am truly part / of a harmony. The next day I am erased and promised to be / redefined with detailed contours.” – Mkhulu Maphikisa Yellow Shade evokes the stark textures of township and rural community life: the beauty and passion, the cruelty and humour, the noise, music and stillness. Sedite’s poems are constructed from unpredictable images – ‘a rain-sniffing wind’, ‘the knuckles of chairs’, a cupboard ‘wailing like a dog left alone in a garage’ – in a gritty language entirely her own. * An emotionally powerful, richly allusive poet speaking the language of pictures rather than overt narrative. Sometimes the concentration and sudden divergence of images make a given poem obscure… I’m reminded of harsh, rich, crowded brush strokes […] Themes of death, betrayal, illness, abuse. Builds the commonplace textures, colours, smells of township and rural life into complex, sophisticated images of feeling and being. Underlying a sense of bitterness, despair, loss in her image-crammed world. Occasionally hope emerges, either randomly, or through the liberating power of creative work.
– Ken Barris Rough Music: Selected Poems 1989-2013 is a selection of poems from the nine books and manuscripts written by Ari Sitas between 1989 and 2013, in poetic forms that range from exuberant jazz-like improvisations to astringent political observation, humorous dialogues and diary-like narratives. * [Sitas’s] close involvement in the workers’ movement is evident in [his] own poetry: it teems with references to the lives and spaces of the marginalised, but not as artifice, a nod to political correctness. Rather, there is a fulsomeness to the world represented in his poetry that teems in contrast to the almost misanthropic silences and blind spots of much South African poetry caught in narrow, unseeing class perspectives. And it carries the ring of truth of someone who moves through these spaces, who knows the people. – Rustum Kozain, New Coin In 1874, aged 20, the visionary poet Arthur Rimbaud abandoned poetry and left France for Africa. He spent some years in Cyprus and Aden, then settled in Ethiopia, during the reign of King Menelek. He became a trader in coffee, guns and hides, and considered trading in slaves. * Despite scant review attention when it came out, Slave Trades is a book often lauded in informal conversation among historically sussed poets and literati in South Africa. […] Sitas conceptualised Slave Trades – an epic in large fragments – as some form of literary corrective to the blank spaces figured in colonial representations of Africa, specifically Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Rimbaud is central and Sitas imagines “the voice of a cynical Rimbaud” and those of his Ethiopian lovers, of kings and queens in a world in flux, but a full world. It is an astonishing piece of work, maintaining a feverish tension between, but short of, the exotic and the real. – Rustum Kozain, New Coin Walking, Falling is Kelwyn Sole’s seventh collection of poetry. With a wide variety of forms and tones, it extends and deepens themes that emerged in his earlier books: love and human relationships, the exposing of false and clichéd perspectives in our socio-political life, our relationship as South Africans to land and landscape. * Whether the theme is the end of a relationship or the murder of immigrants, there is the calm look of analysis, a voice, like a conscience, that threatens to disturb the reader’s complacency, but a voice simultaneously gentle with empathy and sincerity. – Rustum Kozain The Hurricurrent is a book of unusual forms, surprising images, simple yet sophisticated language, encompassing doubt and humour. * The Hurricurrent has a profound sense of lived-ness about it; of being felt and heard and experienced along the bone. It also has a unique quality in SA poetry of gently and naturally combining a local flavour and local voice with what one might call a more metaphysical voice, a voice concerned with giving the interior its rightful shape and sound.
– Kobus Moolman
– Denis Hirson Chris van Wyk’s first (and only) book of poems, It Is Time to Go Home, was published in 1979 when he was 22 years old. He went on to become a well-known and much-loved writer of memoirs, biographies, fiction and children’s stories. But he continued to write poems; some were published in literary magazines and some in his memoir Shirley, Goodness & Mercy (2004). This volume brings together a selection of these poems, along with a substantial selection from his first book. * His style includes a variety of focalisations, a recurring use of irony and an attention to quotidian detail, focusing on the daily lives and lamentations of people around him in the street. No aspect of township life is regarded as too mundane or too insignificant; which demonstrates both his social commitment and his refusal to be content with sloganizing. […] This is one of South Africa’s finest poets. His poetry contains a richness that should inspire future analysis from a number of different thematic and formal angles: this is particularly so, given the fact that the depth and significance of van Wyk’s example and work must have grown unfamiliar to some of our younger generation of readers and admirers of poetry up until now. – Kelwyn Sole, New Coin Phillip Zhuwao’s poems in Sunrise Poison are visceral, sharp-witted, linguistically playful, uncompromising in their anarchic intensity. Rich in classical and literary references and following moments of chance, the lines move rapidly between the poet’s inner torment, the scarred landscape of Harare’s townships, and powerful images of rage and beauty.
The Bavino Sermons
R160.00
Lesego Rampolokeng
Bird-Monk Seding
R220.00
Lesego Rampolokeng
Head on Fire
R180.00
Lesego Rampolokeng
One measure of a poet is the range of his concerns, and Rampolokeng takes on religion, war, street violence, global economics, obscenity, history, wordplay, sexual perversion and, not least, his own contradictions. If he spatters the reader with blood and body fluids, it is to ‘engage with my world in all its manifestations… I want to see all the spluttered blood and gore. So I’m attempting to embrace its beauty. Hopefully.’
whiteheart
R180.00
Lesego Rampolokeng
skeptical erections
R120.00
Mxolisi Dolla Sapeta
skeptical erections is the work of a true multimedia artist. I call him a storyteller because in skeptical erections Sapeta has proven that in a few words you can tell a story, paint a picture and evoke thought.
Yellow Shade
R140.00
Dimakatso Sedite
Rough Music
R180.00
Ari Sitas
The poetry is alive with much else as well – the grotesque and the carnivalesque, the smells and sights of the world as it obtains in South Africa, especially Durban (most of his poetry), Ethiopia in Slave Trades (2000), or Cyprus and Greece in Rhythmskewed (1991); Sitas was born in Cyprus.
Slave Trades
R180.00
Ari Sitas
Ari Sitas’s 100-page poem Slave Trades, the first part of this book, is an attempt to speak in the voices of Rimbaud, of his Ethiopian ‘wives’ and of priests, poets, kings and the marketplace, in a chorus of vivid images. It describes colonial brutality and African resistance, both political and spiritual: “I hope, therefore I am.”
The second part of the book, “An Artist’s Notebook”, is a long fictional prose-poem set in war-ravaged Ethiopia in the 1990s, in which a diverse group of disaffected people, some of them descendants of the characters in Slave Trades, struggle to understand their roots and identities.
Walking, Falling
R160.00
Kelwyn Sole
The Hurricurrent
R120.00
Rosamund Stanford
There is a definite, inventive, audible voice in The Hurricurrent, which takes strength and originality from its precarious balance in the world, a voice constantly unlearning the ways we are taught to see, but also one capable of laying down two solid feet without losing a quirky, laughter-edged, unflinching note.
My Mother’s Laughter: Selected Poems
R160.00
Chris van Wyk
Sunrise Poison
R160.00
Phillip Zhuwao