Cover Art: Photograph by Michael Jaspan

Complete Poems

Isabella 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.

*

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

 

Date of publication: 2016

ISBN 978-0-9870282-7-3 / ebook ISBN 978-1-928476-23-8
58 pages
200 x 130mm

R120.00

 

Isabella Motadinyane 1999 © Poetry99

Isabella Motadinyane was born in 1963 in Mofolo Central, Soweto. She completed classes up to Grade Five in her formal schooling. She studied piano at the Five Roses Bowl in Soweto, and also attended dance and acting classes.
She was brought up by her grandmother and adopted the surname Motadinyane. At the time of her death on 19 February 2003 – her 40th birthday – she was living with her mother in Orange Farm, south of Johannesburg.
Motadinyane had a style of writing and performing that was entirely her own. On the page her poems are intense, funny, erotic and painful, while her onstage delivery, whether speech or song, was electrifying in its vitality and timing. Her elliptical associative poems mixed languages (English, Isicamtho, Setswana and Sesotho), and cross rural and urban cultures.
She was an active member of the Botsotso Jesters poetry performance group, in fact the group’s name came from one of her poems. Touching tributes to her by other Botsotso members are included in the book.

Books published
(With other Botsotso Jesters) We Jive Like This (Botsotso, 1996)
(With other Botsotso Jesters) Dirty Washing (Botsotso, 1999)
Bella (Botsotso, 2007)
Complete Poems (republication of Bella) (Deep South, 2016).

 

Additional information

Weight 0.5 kg

Reviews of this book

Review by Vangile Gantsho of Collected Poems by Isabella Motadinyane    New Coin, 2016      text PDF

Review by Kwanele Sosibo of Collected Poems by Isabella Motadinyane    Mail & Guardian, 2016     text PDF

Interviews & Articles

"Toward a biography of Isicamtho poet, Isabella Motadinyane" by Sizakele Nkosi    Botsotso, 2021     text PDF

"Tribute to Isabella Motadinayne" by Ike Muila    Botsotso Literary Journal, 2004     text PDF

Shopping Basket0
There are no products in the cart!
Continue shopping
0