Alan Finlay
-
(don’t fall, ma said)
R160.00Alan Finlay
(don’t fall, ma said) is a memoir in 25 poems that records Finlay’s childhood and primary school days in the 1970s to early-1980s when his family lived in Honeydew outside Johannesburg.
In stark images and the blunt tones of South African dialogue, the poems bring to life scenes of daily life – family, school, horses, teachers, grandparents, neighbours, farm workers and friends – to evoke the atmosphere of a white boyhood at that time. -
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.
*
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