Authors J-P
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Scrim
R120.00Haidee Kotze
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.
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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
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geruisloos, ongemerk
R180.00Henali Kuit
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.
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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
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The incredible beat of my heart
R180.00Henali Kuit
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
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After Troy
R180.00Taban lo Liyong
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.
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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
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i lost a poem
R120.00Mzwandile Matiwana
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.
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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
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Requiem
R120.00Joan Metelerkamp
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?
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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
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Under dark under branches
R160.00Joan Metelerkamp
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.
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A Book of Rooms
R120.00Kobus Moolman
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.
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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
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Light and After
R120.00Kobus Moolman
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
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Complete Poems
R120.00Isabella Motadinyane
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.
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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
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earthstepper/the ocean is very shallow
R120.00Seitlhamo Motsapi
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
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ten flapping elbows, mama
R120.00Khulile Nxumalo
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.’
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[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