Dan Wylie takes a look at some recent volumes of South African poetry
In the hand, Jeremy Gordin’s Pomegranates for My Son (Random House) feels solid, the font unpretentious on a cover of warm amber whose texture is at once rough and even. Ditto for the contents. These poems are generous as a bear hug, weighty with Jewishness. Drawing on Lithuanian ancestries as well as vivid with the South African present, they are the tender ruminations of a middle-aged family man “trying to re-write that failed novel,/ his own childhood”.
This is an effort neither sentimentalised nor embittered; it’s clear-eyed, recognising that “to recall us is not/ to come upon a mountain pool of clear/ and refreshing memories, but to stumble again/ over the canvas bag of rough and pitted tools/ that ratcheted me out of boyhood”. To arrive, via family loss (central are the many warmly ironic poems about his father), political mayhem, psychotherapy, troubling sexuality, at our “money-grubbing and inarticulate” present, is neither easy nor entirely hopeless. It brings, for instance, the knowledge that “the maturer search is not for a body, but for eyes/ gentled by kindness, wit and a certain light;/ and that one finds them seldom, mostly never”.
The thinnest poems are those set in non- Jewish South Africa – a criticism less of Gordin than of the poverty of a modern white South African “culture” utterly devoid of the ritualistic depth so evident in Gordin’s Jewish childhood, when one would “lay teffelin and wear a tallis/ and chant all the prayers and zmires”. (Gordin provides unfussy notes for us goyim.)
Gordin has published poetry before, though he’s better known now for his journalism. Journalistic these poems are emphatically not: they are direct, deeply felt, humane, salutary. Random House’s flyer announced Pomegranates for My Son as the first in a series; rumour alleges it will prove to be a one-off. I hope not, either for the imprint or this lovely poet.
No Free Sleeping (Botsotso) is a less beautifully, if interestingly, designed triple bill – Donald Parenzee, Fred Vonani Bila and Alan Finlay. Anna Varney’s sometimes distractingly abstract designs, the harsh recycled paper, the verse itself – all assert a distance from what Bila calls “the affluent English university literary junta with its `high standards'”, and Allan Kolski Horwitz, in a useful introduction, “the innate undesireability of a dictated tradition”.
Parenzee produces (I’m sure the junta would agree), very strong, approachable poems, complex with Cape Town’s local colour, deftly interleaving public awareness with individual intimacies. Almost all these 28 poems are beautifully observed and turned, appealing (in both senses), insistently caring without hectoring, searching out creative ways to live “in succulence/ harming nobody./ Why do we live so coldly,/ in stone rooms?/ Everything/ needed for the crafting of life/ seems to be waiting inside us.”
Bila, by contrast, is angry, in-your-face, seemingly no less arrogant than the “junta” he caricatures. But the ranting is the oddly selfless obverse of a caring not far removed from Parenzee’s. Here, social conscience is all. If the “voice of the people” is by nature frequently simplistic and simply dull, the corruption, war- mongering and neglect of poverty Bila rails against deserve everything he can throw at them.
Bila is also pioneering that multilingual strand in (largely black) South African poetry, one of the more educative and culturally inclusive developments. If we don’t understand all Bila’s languages (many of these poems are already translations, originals alongside), so much the worse for us.
At his best, Finlay is a brilliant explorer of difficult love. His poems are delicate, physically explicit but emotionally indirect, winsomely surreal. He strains to encompass the public, with a resultant loss of authenticity. The 18 poems included here often seem more tossed than crafted, but turn up many intuitive gems, fleeting as the moments they tentatively celebrate: “Slowly, the jet ticks the sky./ You’re on borrowed time,/ in uncertain territory./ You go with your backpack of fire,/ the leaves stitching the air.”
All three poets (and a dozen others) reappear in the latest issue of Botsotso. Varney is also responsible for this A4- format journal’s jazzy, vivacious design. Shiny paper plus faint print sometimes make it visually challenging, but it’s a “different” mag well worth supporting.
I riddled several times through David McKay’s Passages, Place Names (Institute for the Study of English in Africa – ISEA), trying to figure why these dense, cerebral poems failed to satisfy – despite having won the 1997 Sanlam Literary Award. His power of observation is intense, his imagery often arresting, the subjects wide- ranging. Northumbrian archaeologists, for example, “scribble through clods/ until, wrapped in hammered gold, a keepsake,/ comes to the hand like a guddled fish, mud/ dribbling from one fatal gill, harmed by the/ action, impossible to put back again”.
That’s quite fine; but, finally, I think, these are the poems of a traveller, almost touristic. Too often self-consciously clever, too deft with vocabularies not lived out as the poet’s own, they seldom seem to have found their emotional centre.
So one poem, Indian Tailor, opens with powerful visuals: “An anonymous faade of clobber/ mobs the window./ Through the door,/ racked coats shape [sic] like felons/ shuffling down skid row. Pin-strip [sic]/ suits hang in body-bags.” But the forbidding promise is unfulfilled; it ends simply: “`… Tuesday?’/ But you can’t pin him down.” So? I missed the sense of personal commitment and search so strong in Gordin’s poems.
And coming from my own university’s ISEA, the several typos are most unfortunate. So much for the junta’s “high standards”.
Dan Wylie recently won the Olive Schreiner Award for his poetry collection The Road Out