Angifi Dladla
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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