Authors A-I
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Bloodred Dragonflies
R160.00Jim Pascual Agustin
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.
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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
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All the Days
R120.00Robert Berold
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
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Poetry99
R160.00Robert Berold (ed.)
Poetry 99: Twenty South African Poets in Performance
Edited by Robert Berold
Co-published by Deep South and TimbilaIn 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:
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.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
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Bilakhulu!
R160.00Vonani Bila
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.’
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KwaNobuhle Overcast
R120.00Ayanda Billie
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.
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A Naked Bone
R120.00Mangaliso Buzani
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.
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Lament for Kofifi Macu
R160.00Angifi Dladla
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.
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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
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The girl who then feared to sleep
R120.00Angifi Dladla
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.
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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
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That kind of door
R120.00Alan Finlay
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.
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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
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otherwise you well?
R120.00Richard Fox
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.
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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
on Fox’s poem “Animal Mind is Tripping” -
my mother, my madness
R220.00Colleen Higgs
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.
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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
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In the Heat of Shadows
R180.00Denis Hirson (Ed.)
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:
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.