Mxolisi Nyezwa
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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.’
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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What lies behind a great poem, I remember Karen Press saying once, is ‘the quality of the thought’. Her ninth collection, Slowly, As If, abounds in just this conceptual richness. In a wry, unassuming and deceptively limpid voice, these poems speak out against the old evils of war, inhumanity and corruption in a startlingly new and memorable way.
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Slowly, As If makes us sit up and pay attention to every African, South African and global ill we have become hardened to through over-exposure. (‘Do you love yourself like this?’ the speaker asks an obese parliamentarian.)
The collection gives critique and compassion in equal measure. An ironic praise poem to Jacob Zuma sits alongside two of the most outstanding South African elegies I have ever read (‘Phendukani Silwani’ and ‘Elaine’s Garden’), as well as moving poems of the deserted heart. After a conversation that signals a devastating change in a relationship, ‘these words pour through my eyes,/desperate creatures running from a fire’. It’s the quality of the thought that stays with one.– Finuala Dowling, reviewing Slowly, As If (2012)