Authors R-Z
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The Bavino Sermons
R160.00Lesego Rampolokeng
Originally published by Gecko Poetry in 1999 and republished 20 years later by Deep South, The Bavino Sermons includes such memorable poems as “Lines for Vincent”, “Riding the victim train”, “To Gil Scott-Heron”, “Crab attack”, “Rap Ranting” and “The Fela Sermon”, as well as some longer poems and prose fragments.
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Passion drives this book. When the matrix of issues is the world we are in now/ yesterday/ the future, and the forecast is strewn with images of gore and madness, we laugh as well. If for some of us the idea of love’s physical gestures might be reduced to twinkling eroticism, Rampolokeng comes in and insists on the bland and blatant […] The Bavino Sermons are sermons of moral outrage. In their satellite eye-view and perspective of witness, the themes crisscross and happen all over…
– Khulile and Sibusiso Nxumalo, reviewing the original 1999 edition
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Bird-Monk Seding
R220.00Lesego Rampolokeng
Bird-Monk Seding, Rampolokeng’s third novel, is a stark picture of life in a rural township in the North West province, two decades into South Africa’s democracy. Listening and observing in the streets and taverns, narrator Bavino Sekete, often feeling desperate himself, is thrown back to his own violent childhood in Soweto. To get through, he turns to his pantheon of jazz innovators and radical writers.
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There are new things in this book. The personal voice is not so relentlessly a voice of disgust as it has sometimes been. Though the shifts between affectionate memory and visceral horror still happen fast enough to feel like a punch in the guts, there are more of the former than there used to be. There’s nobility, fortitude and love in the lives of people such as Seding’s Pogisho and Mmaphefo, risking everything to protect their son. […] It declares it’s a novel. Believe it.
– Gwen Ansell
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Head on Fire
R180.00Lesego Rampolokeng
Head on Fire is Lesego Rampolokeng’s first book of poems to be published in South Africa since The Bavino Sermons in 1999. It includes the complete text of The Second Chapter, published in Berlin in 2003.
One measure of a poet is the range of his concerns, and Rampolokeng takes on religion, war, street violence, global economics, obscenity, history, wordplay, sexual perversion and, not least, his own contradictions. If he spatters the reader with blood and body fluids, it is to ‘engage with my world in all its manifestations… I want to see all the spluttered blood and gore. So I’m attempting to embrace its beauty. Hopefully.’*
No contemporary South African poet – indeed, no writer – has occasioned more approval or disapproval, partly no doubt due to the confrontational nature of Rampolokeng’s poetic persona and style, and the scatological, irreverent content of much of his work. Eclectic and wide-ranging in his influences (these stretch all the way from the figure of the traditional praise poet to Sotho song forms, from rap to the Beats, from Lautreamont and Artaud to Cesaire and Mutabaruka), provocative – some would say apocalyptic – in his performance style and public pronouncements, unique in his varied usage of acoustic regimes and breath-phrasing, unusual in his line structures and his blurring of conventional syntax, his brand of rapped verse has got him, on occasion, into trouble…
– Kelwyn Sole, Cross-Cultural Poetics
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whiteheart
R180.00Lesego Rampolokeng
Written between 1992 and 1997, whiteheart: prologue to hysteria is a nightmarish plunge into a 1970s Soweto childhood where violence waits everywhere to make its nest in the child-narrator’s mind.
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The rap & rhyme intertwined with the vivid images cause your whole internal system to shiver. […] The words come at you like grotesque radical images straight into your imagination, making you very afraid excited educated & emancipated all at once.
– Sonwabo Meyi, Wordstock
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skeptical erections
R120.00Mxolisi Dolla Sapeta
skeptical erections is a book of startling visual and verbal imagination. Sapeta’s poems are short narratives of survival – his own and those of others. In a graphic language style, the book creates a world of mistrust and skepticism, tinged with humour. Despite their distortions and traumas, the characters are treated with respect and compassion.
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Sapeta is an artist who sees, feels and puts to words as much as he expresses himself through painting. His often-short poems (quintain style) carry powerful imagery if not the dire conditions. In “dreams and heroes” he writes: “each day I am repeatedly told that it’s ok, that I am truly part / of a harmony. The next day I am erased and promised to be / redefined with detailed contours.”
skeptical erections is the work of a true multimedia artist. I call him a storyteller because in skeptical erections Sapeta has proven that in a few words you can tell a story, paint a picture and evoke thought.– Mkhulu Maphikisa
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Yellow Shade
R140.00Dimakatso Sedite
Yellow Shade evokes the stark textures of township and rural community life: the beauty and passion, the cruelty and humour, the noise, music and stillness. Sedite’s poems are constructed from unpredictable images – ‘a rain-sniffing wind’, ‘the knuckles of chairs’, a cupboard ‘wailing like a dog left alone in a garage’ – in a gritty language entirely her own.
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An emotionally powerful, richly allusive poet speaking the language of pictures rather than overt narrative. Sometimes the concentration and sudden divergence of images make a given poem obscure… I’m reminded of harsh, rich, crowded brush strokes […] Themes of death, betrayal, illness, abuse. Builds the commonplace textures, colours, smells of township and rural life into complex, sophisticated images of feeling and being. Underlying a sense of bitterness, despair, loss in her image-crammed world. Occasionally hope emerges, either randomly, or through the liberating power of creative work.
– Ken Barris
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Rough Music
R180.00Ari Sitas
Rough Music: Selected Poems 1989-2013 is a selection of poems from the nine books and manuscripts written by Ari Sitas between 1989 and 2013, in poetic forms that range from exuberant jazz-like improvisations to astringent political observation, humorous dialogues and diary-like narratives.
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[Sitas’s] close involvement in the workers’ movement is evident in [his] own poetry: it teems with references to the lives and spaces of the marginalised, but not as artifice, a nod to political correctness. Rather, there is a fulsomeness to the world represented in his poetry that teems in contrast to the almost misanthropic silences and blind spots of much South African poetry caught in narrow, unseeing class perspectives. And it carries the ring of truth of someone who moves through these spaces, who knows the people.
The poetry is alive with much else as well – the grotesque and the carnivalesque, the smells and sights of the world as it obtains in South Africa, especially Durban (most of his poetry), Ethiopia in Slave Trades (2000), or Cyprus and Greece in Rhythmskewed (1991); Sitas was born in Cyprus.– Rustum Kozain, New Coin
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Slave Trades
R180.00Ari Sitas
In 1874, aged 20, the visionary poet Arthur Rimbaud abandoned poetry and left France for Africa. He spent some years in Cyprus and Aden, then settled in Ethiopia, during the reign of King Menelek. He became a trader in coffee, guns and hides, and considered trading in slaves.
Ari Sitas’s 100-page poem Slave Trades, the first part of this book, is an attempt to speak in the voices of Rimbaud, of his Ethiopian ‘wives’ and of priests, poets, kings and the marketplace, in a chorus of vivid images. It describes colonial brutality and African resistance, both political and spiritual: “I hope, therefore I am.”
The second part of the book, “An Artist’s Notebook”, is a long fictional prose-poem set in war-ravaged Ethiopia in the 1990s, in which a diverse group of disaffected people, some of them descendants of the characters in Slave Trades, struggle to understand their roots and identities.*
Despite scant review attention when it came out, Slave Trades is a book often lauded in informal conversation among historically sussed poets and literati in South Africa. […] Sitas conceptualised Slave Trades – an epic in large fragments – as some form of literary corrective to the blank spaces figured in colonial representations of Africa, specifically Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Rimbaud is central and Sitas imagines “the voice of a cynical Rimbaud” and those of his Ethiopian lovers, of kings and queens in a world in flux, but a full world. It is an astonishing piece of work, maintaining a feverish tension between, but short of, the exotic and the real.
– Rustum Kozain, New Coin
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Walking, Falling
R160.00Kelwyn Sole
Walking, Falling is Kelwyn Sole’s seventh collection of poetry. With a wide variety of forms and tones, it extends and deepens themes that emerged in his earlier books: love and human relationships, the exposing of false and clichéd perspectives in our socio-political life, our relationship as South Africans to land and landscape.
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Whether the theme is the end of a relationship or the murder of immigrants, there is the calm look of analysis, a voice, like a conscience, that threatens to disturb the reader’s complacency, but a voice simultaneously gentle with empathy and sincerity.
– Rustum Kozain
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The Hurricurrent
R120.00Rosamund Stanford
The Hurricurrent is a book of unusual forms, surprising images, simple yet sophisticated language, encompassing doubt and humour.
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The Hurricurrent has a profound sense of lived-ness about it; of being felt and heard and experienced along the bone. It also has a unique quality in SA poetry of gently and naturally combining a local flavour and local voice with what one might call a more metaphysical voice, a voice concerned with giving the interior its rightful shape and sound.
– Kobus Moolman
There is a definite, inventive, audible voice in The Hurricurrent, which takes strength and originality from its precarious balance in the world, a voice constantly unlearning the ways we are taught to see, but also one capable of laying down two solid feet without losing a quirky, laughter-edged, unflinching note.– Denis Hirson
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My Mother’s Laughter: Selected Poems
R160.00Chris van Wyk
Chris van Wyk’s first (and only) book of poems, It Is Time to Go Home, was published in 1979 when he was 22 years old. He went on to become a well-known and much-loved writer of memoirs, biographies, fiction and children’s stories. But he continued to write poems; some were published in literary magazines and some in his memoir Shirley, Goodness & Mercy (2004). This volume brings together a selection of these poems, along with a substantial selection from his first book.
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His style includes a variety of focalisations, a recurring use of irony and an attention to quotidian detail, focusing on the daily lives and lamentations of people around him in the street. No aspect of township life is regarded as too mundane or too insignificant; which demonstrates both his social commitment and his refusal to be content with sloganizing. […] This is one of South Africa’s finest poets. His poetry contains a richness that should inspire future analysis from a number of different thematic and formal angles: this is particularly so, given the fact that the depth and significance of van Wyk’s example and work must have grown unfamiliar to some of our younger generation of readers and admirers of poetry up until now.
– Kelwyn Sole, New Coin
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Sunrise Poison
R160.00Phillip Zhuwao
Phillip Zhuwao’s poems in Sunrise Poison are visceral, sharp-witted, linguistically playful, uncompromising in their anarchic intensity. Rich in classical and literary references and following moments of chance, the lines move rapidly between the poet’s inner torment, the scarred landscape of Harare’s townships, and powerful images of rage and beauty.