Dan Wylie
ECHO LOCATION by Karen Press (Gecko Poetry)
With Snailpress bowing out, other small presses are lumbering in to fill the vacuum, and Durban’s Gecko Books has produced two substantial and handsome volumes. What a pleasure to encounter, in Karen Press’s latest collection, winsome fun balancing the intimate tragedies of ordinary folk. Echo Location is subtitled A Guide to Sea Point for Residents and Visitors, and offers an empathetic, diamond-faceted take on the histories and vistas of Press’s home environment. There are few actual moments when “our air shakes itself loose of history/ and laughs”: even so impoverished (but feistily charming) a character as Alida, who speaks in several poems, is trapped in a deep, distasteful history. The fun is in the compilation: between poems of scintillating observation, worthy successors to her Coffee-Shop Poems, are “found poems” extracted from historical accounts, newspapers, even library catalogues, snatches of conversation (Jou ma se poes, walk the bladdy dog) filling overheard corners, and a tour of Sea Point’s multinational eateries scrolling along the bottom of the pages. I can’t begin to do justice here to Press’s humane delicacy, variety of voice, lucent blends of homely and political, paradisal and awful, a revelling in life persisting even while, as “the boys play soccer,/ broken bottles cut each other” beneath the grass. Don’t hesitate; buy this volume; drink it down.
LOVE THAT IS NIGHT by Kelwyn Sole (Gecko Poetry)
Like Press, Kelwyn Sole writes energetically and powerfully of people enmeshed in this country’s turbulent, rhetorically violent politics. This 110- page collection, Sole’s third, is commanded by a bitterly jesting tone, sardonic redeployments of political and media discourses, at once academic and visceral. It’s gloomy, acidic, riven with irony; Sole searches continually for points of leverage outside the numbing rhetorics of our age, even the rhetorics of his own distinctly left-wing sympathies – and his own poetry. Delicious wordplay (“kilogramscis of quotes”, “melaninian”), sarcastic juxtaposition, and formal fragmentation combat the desuetude of “A life rumpled by its living” in which we yet “at times … wish for nothing more”. He is at once funny and disturbing: Poem in Black and White, on the political aspirations of penguins – and the impossibility of writing non- politically – is brilliant. In an image reminiscent of Press’s: “In roadside grass glinting fierce/ as knives a/ child pisses,// flicks off his future/ once, strides serenely out of purview:/ this season brings in nothing new.” Those line- breaks give some idea of Sole’s formal experimentation, which is unremitting and sometimes just irritating, but which both critiques and enacts the perception that, even in the most lyrical moments of intimate love, no ultimate truth prevails. A dynamic, disconcerting protest against the complacent diatribes of public discourse and poetic conventions.
SACRED LOVE by Mteto Mzongwana (Zondwa Yem- Yem Press)
Mzongwana’s first collection was published by Snailpress; his second is bravely self- published in his home of Nyanga. At his best, he’s gently suggestive, evocative without being obscure: “Homes are like/ waiting rooms,/ the sinking ship/ in the ocean,/ oh heaven on earth/ our lives on screen/ lest we forget”. There are just enough obvious errors (“Amageddon”, “wodows” for widows) to raise suspicions that some of his interesting constructions are accidental rather than creative. The brief collection is balanced – or torn – between grim visions of the “nothingness/ of our humankind” and a trite idealism couched in the vapidities of “mother Nature” and some inexhaustibly idyllic “Africa landscape of Paradise”. On the one hand, Mzongwana arrestingly describes his people as “Modeling dolls window/ dressed/ and standing still/ like steel”, plagued by “criminals on a rampage” and finding “no ark in the fire”; on the other; this talented writer resorts to the sad slogans of an atavistic “continent vast and beautiful”. The cliches make the critique ring just a little hollow – or perhaps just underline the limits on the imagination of hope.
ZEN FROG AND OTHER POEMS by Candy Neubert (Carapace Poets)
Snailpress may be dead but, like snails in your garden, it seems that Gus Ferguson’s publishing energies are ineradicable. Neubert’s Zen Frog promises to be “the first of a series of slim collections” associated with Carapace magazine. Neubert lives in England now, but few of her poems are overtly rooted in place; they have a feather-light, tangential quality, a deftly (sometimes too vaguely) metaphysical air. Not all the poems are equally inspired or weighty; some are Zen to the extent that they advocate the benefits of stillness, like the title frog, still sitting on that stone months later, “and not a moment lost”. The most moving are those about her ageing parents; and the best leave wide airy spaces for readers to fill: “There are sentences of death here,/ and tall memories, and god.// Fruit-trees ready to fall,/ under-lit by headlights.// Against the wall, a bicycle./ My mother wants to ride away,// but she is eighty-four,/ held by the enemy” (“Single Daughter”).