Mxolisi Nyezwa
-
Bhlawa’s Inconsolable Spirits
R220.00Mxolisi Nyezwa
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
-
Malikhanye
R120.00Mxolisi Nyezwa
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: Selected Poems
R300.00Karen Press
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)