/ 22 May 1998

Dan Wylie: New poetry

TRANSFER by Ingrid de Kok (Snailpress R42,50)

One can only celebrate this triumph of delicate bleakness:

One by one

the small refusals

add up to a life.

Or this rich characterisation of complex love:

Mouthing under water

wetly jewelled words

we are acrobatic aquanauts

in a chest of swords.

The first half of the book is a medley of meditations on decaying suburbia, the Cappuchin Ossuary in Rome, the truth commission, the “resurrection plant” (too ready-made a poetic symbol for even Ingrid de Kok to make a wholly successful poem out of), and deft observations of Cape Town where

trucks digest the city’s sediment

men gloved and silent

in the municipal jaws.

Often, for De Kok, bodies and words are interdependent; both are “texts of necessity”, flawed and inescapable as you rename/ the stirring of some/ unscheduled love or pain.

There is in this collection, De Kok’s first since Familiar Ground (1988), a fruitful tension between simple gestures and a charming extravagance of metaphor:

Like a wishbone

or the instep of your foot

this parabolic love curves…

You breathe me out

I breathe you in

the smell of your skin

is salt and tide and tin.

De Kok is at her best, I think, in the second half’s considerations of her roles as woman: lover, mother, daughter. The love poems, like Brush Stroke, are extraordinarily beautiful, and can only add to De Kok’s growing reputation as one of our best poets:

In the night a dream creases

you against me momentarily,

unfolding origami bird

in suspended rain, on a bending

tree…

DEPARTURES by Moira Lovell (Snailpress R42,50)

The tones of Moira Lovell’s second collection are as “elusive” as the god that haunts these poems like another furnishing of a lovingly rendered but dangerous suburb. At times Lovell seems merely winsomely observing: “Stars tiptoe past on/ Perspex stilettos/ Down deep passages.” It’s perhaps mean to ask, “And so?” Elsewhere, Lovell hovers tantalisingly between witty parody and heartfelt sentiment; in Flame Lilies, for instance, the speakers find themselves, laughably, grieving at a mistaken grave. This poem in not-quite-heroic couplets is, characteristically, cleanly crafted:

According to their separate wills

The old man, on becoming still,

Was spooned into a Grecian urn;

His wife, who did not want to burn,

Was freighted in a gracious box

Excessively bestrewn with phlox.

I can’t decide if this distancing-through-wit is a strength or not; those poems which don’t employ this not-quite-sardonic device, like the metaphysical Locust (reminiscent of Ruth Miller’s Mantis, though not half as disturbing), are more portentous, heavier in execution.

Similarly, the same slightly twee suburbia that spawns lightweight poems on arums, sunflowers, cats and snails, also breeds darker poems on leaving Zimbabwe, on death in this “rough old world” (title of the excellent closing sonnet), and on our contemporary security shambles. The conventional Christmas Dinner is archly recontextualised:

We hear the carolling of the sirens

While gifts, less lasting than gold,

we proffer,

Less holy than incense, less

healing than myrrh.

That’s a great closing line. These are admirably controlled, intelligent poems often brittle with defensiveness against a world in which “Dirty water wrinkles/ At the city’s ankles/ Like old military socks.”

SWIMMER by Cheryl Spence (Firfield Pamphlets, R33,50)

Unless invested with sufficient inner tension and suggestiveness, haiku can be horribly pap – and the Ferguson-inspired Great South African Haiku Renaissance has produced some grotesque clunkers.

In this first collection of 30 haiku-like love poems, however, Cheryl Spence consistently triumphs over banality. One advantage of her form is that the poems don’t have to be butchered in these bonsai reviews; but read together they offer a picture more complex than the mere sum of the parts. Moments caught, like fireflies, can be unreservedly, biblically sensual:

redeemed now, your feast

my thighs heavy with honey

a chalice, my breast

Or complexly fuse abandon with guilt:

my prayers fail – I taste

again your carnival mouth

free delicious fall

They can be violently angry:

filthy black wind

teach me how to hate

toss hard words, break…

Or disconcertingly vulnerable:

come, jungle lover

tangled limbs, blooming skin, be

unruly, plunder

At their best, these lush alightings of mood sing with tender contradiction:

sated, your face shut

adrift in a sea of sheets

I can’t have your hand