THE NEW CENTURY OF SOUTH AFRICAN POETRY, edited by Michael Chapman (Donker), is what used to be called “inclusive” — the word now has a tincture of liberal condescension about it, but this is surely the most inclusive anthology of South African poetry imaginable [Buy online]. Everyone is here. Beside all the established poets, there are the poets of the new dispensation, as well as many items that would not traditionally have been regarded as poetry in the strictest sense. These include Dutch “picnic songs”, “found voices”, songs (protest or otherwise — one of which is the glorious We’re Marching to Pretoria, dating from the Anglo-Boer South African War), even the artist Chickenman’s handwritten signs. If you want an historical overview of South African poetry, this is the book to have.
If, on the other hand, you want a snapshot of the latest developments in South African poetry (though
the two are not exclusive of one another), IT ALL BEGINS: POEMS FROM POST-LIBERATION SOUTH AFRICA, edited by Robert Berold (Gecko), is essential. Berold has edited the journal New Coin for a decade, and these poems are chosen from that time and that publication. Dambudzo Marechera was neither South African nor alive during the period covered, but a posthumously discovered poem of his sums it up: “Will this moon scrape itself off my poems! / This twilight zone stretching between English school / And my cockroach voice?” That’s the space in which these sharp, experimental, open, often puzzling, usually stimulating poems happen — somewhere in the gap between the “English school” of the past and the “cockroach voice” of the new South Africa’s determined survivors. That poetry itself seems to be a survivor is cause for celebration.
Surviving, too, as poetic voices are several veterans of South African poetry.
Keorapsese Kgositsile is represented by IF I COULD SING: SELECTED POEMS (Kwela) [Buy online]. His fractured, urgent work demands close attention; he insists that the struggle against apartheid was an act of love. James Matthews may not be so certain; or at least he wasn’t in 1977, when his angry POEMS FROM A PRISON CELL (Realities) was first published. Now available once more, this formerly banned volume shows a determination to resist the mental destruction that such a sentence could have imposed. His work is “sparse and complete”, said one critic.
Chris Mann’s new volume, HEARTLANDS (University of Natal Press), shows once again what a superb poet of place he is. (He may now have seized Stephen Watson’s crown; at any rate, those two will have to duke it out.) Here are places galore that, in Mann’s enlightening view, tell us something about South Africa and about the human soul. Mann uses the more traditional forms with a conversational ease; he never hectors or declaims, but his gentle sympathy is deeply touching. “A place is what you make of it,” he says, but also: “A place is what it makes of you.”
Don Maclennan is located in the same part of the world as Mann, but where Mann’s vision moves outward, from feeling and perception into the world, Maclennan’s seems to turn inward more readily. There
is something gnarled and gnomic about the poems in THE ROAD TO KROMDRAAI (Snailpress), but also something deeply imbedded in the transcendent mundanities of life: “I am still grovelling / at the roots / of consciousness, / trying to read its scrawl.”
Fiona Zerbst is a younger poet, and TIME AND AGAIN (Snailpress) is her third volume. With an undoubted lyric gift that seems especially well equipped for the elegiac tone of loss, she traces a journey that is both physical and spiritual. She can even do rhyme, without its feeling forced, when she wants to.
Ingrid de Kok is also on her third volume, and she’s shaping up to be one of our finest poets. TERRESTRIAL THINGS (Kwela/Snailpress) unites the classical past with emergent Africa; she can speak of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as trenchantly as she can recall childhood memories [Buy online]. Rich and pertinent, this collection will be treasured in years to come for its clarity and honesty.
And for those who want to catch up with a South African classic, Tafelberg and Human & Rousseau have reissued the VERSAMELDE GEDIGTE of the man who was perhaps the greatest poet produced by the Afrikaans language, NP van Wyk Louw.