Heart’s Hunger: Selected Poems
Karen 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.
[…]
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)
Date of publication: 2024
ISBN 978-1-928476-52-8 ebook ISBN 978-1-928476-53-5
220 pages
200 x 130
R300.00
Karen Press 2018 © Daryl Glass
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Karen Press lives in Cape Town, where she works as a freelance editor and writer. Her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies in South Africa and abroad, and she has published twelve collections of poems. As a translator of Afrikaans poetry she has worked primarily on the poems of Antjie Krog, including Krog’s two recent collections, Synapse and Pillage. Poetry books published Co-editor (with Ingrid de Kok): Spring Is Rebellious: Arguments about Cultural Freedom
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Additional information
| Weight | 0.5 kg |
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Reviews of this book
Review by Finuala Dowling of Heart's Hunger by Karen Press The Johannesburg Review of Books, 2024
Other Links
Reviews of other books
Review by Chris Dunton of The Canary's Songbook by Karen Press Sunday Independent, 2006 text PDF
Review by Jane Routh of The Canary's Songbook by Karen Press Tears in the Fence (Carcanet), 2005 text PDF
Review by Jeremy Cronin of Echo Location by Karen Press Sunday Independent, 1998 text PDF
Review by Margaret Lenta of The Little Museum of Working Life by Karen Press Sunday Independent, 2004 text PDF
Review by Priya Narismulu of Home by Karen Press New Coin, 2001 text PDF
Downloadable full book PDF
The Loving and Lovable City (May Not Yet Be Here) by Karen Press privately published, 2023 full text PDF
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