City in Words
Compiled by Ingrid de Kock and Gus Ferguson
Cape Town
David Philip 2001
Reviewed by Jane Rosenthal
The compilation of this book was, in itself, a work of some genius, givingthose of us who have previously read these poems, but not thought to collectthem into one book, an immediate jolt of recognition for the perfectsimplicity of the idea. More than forty poems from works published over a decademainly by Snailpress, Carapace and David Philip, all touch on the MotherCity in some way; loved by many, hated by others, but there, life-like andastonishingly various, as the poems show. Impossible to choose a favourite,but for example Karen Press’ Tips for Visitors, veers between hilarity,caution and nostalgia. Or Wendy Woodward’s The Corner of Modderdam Road andRoute 300 to Kuilsrivier, which traces the changes in an old houseweathering the times. For residents, visitors and “loved ones” now livingabroad, this is a gem. Buy many copies – why not?The cover deserves a mention; trading on the current popularity of fridgepoetry, with the title spelt out in children’s alphabet fridge magnets, nodoubt pointing the way to treasures within, the real poems from a city richin poets.
The Red Laughter of Guns in Green Summer Rain – by Phillip Zuwayo and Alan Finlay
Green Dragon – edited by Gary Cumminskey
Dye Hard Press
Reviewed by Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon
Dye Hard Press, an independent publisher, run and edited by poet Gary Cumminskey has recently released the first issue of Green Dragon, a planned annual journal of prose and poetry, as well as The Red Laughter of Guns in Green Summer Rain by Phillip Zuwayo and Alan Finlay.Green Dragon opens on a wistful, melancholy note with the poems of Kobus Moolman and Kay Benno. Moolman’s simplicity of phrase is effective, especially in In the garden, which evokes in the closing lines the innate limitations of language in articulating experience – “The sky echoes with everything / there will never be enough words for”. Benno’s poems sombrely infuse the banal physicality of domestic scenes with traces of sexual memory, her poetic process, as she writes in An invitation for a hot drink “mapping routes through fluids/hoping to find/ meaning that matters”. Similarly, later in the collection, pieces by Alan Finlay, Maria Petratos and Roy Blumenthal dwell on themes of love and longing. Yet, in some of the poems, though competently executed, one gets the feeling of deja; vu. There is a lack of originality in style which blurs the identities of individual poets. Thachompoyil Rajeevan’s poems announce a change of mood and pace. They are quicker, the short lines propped with sequences of discordant imagery, particularly effective in Haunted, where the image of a bedridden grandpa becomes mechanical, an appendage to the “broken wires, tubes/ and rusty needles/ in the nose, mouth / and penis”. Similarly, Philip Hammial’s poems are fast-paced, bristling with Thomas Pynchon-like chaos and humour. Gus Ferguson, legendary poetry publisher and comic poet, is on form here, with wry reflections on failed searches for spiritual enlightenment, and a diatribe on a fictional post-modern existentialist novel composed from “the letters left at the end of a thousand championship scrabble games” and written in Polish because of the lack of available vowels. Two short stories offer some variation in the collection. Anatomy by Michael Vines tells a story of photographer taking pornographic pictures of a medical student, fusing themes of sexual voyeurism with the ambiguities of youth and death. Arja Salafranca offers in Cul-de-sacs an acute observation of post-1994 white fear, exploring themes of home and emigration, with a story about four friends taking a holiday on a farm. The tone and pace of the collection is well modulated, and though uneven, it contains some moving and enjoyable moments. However, the collection as a whole lacked the freshness of new, dynamic voices that could give labour-of-love publications like Green Dragon, so important for South African literature, the impetus and relevance to stand out and be noticed. In The Red Laughter of Guns In Green Summer Rain, Alan Finlay and the late Zimbabwean poet Phillip Zhuwayo have created a collection of poems, produced in a month and a half in 1995, using a quasi-surrealist method of “talking through the folded paper” – not knowing what the other was writing. “These poems represent a playfulness, an experiment with what could and could not be blinded,” writes Finlay in the introduction.The unselfconsciousness of the poems is refreshing and they contain some beautiful imagery. The poems roll fluidly through the collection, like stream of consciousness praise poetry, gathering within the lines images of “wistful herd boys”; black urine on water-berry trees; blooming suns in the gardens of armpits; “bikinis raping the shy waves” and hyena’s bitten by trees.Yet the poems are not all light, but touch on moments of darkness and rawness. There are distinct undertones of violence, with themes of war and suffering surfacing, notably in the title poem of the collection, alluding to child-soldiers, and images like “It’s hard to be born with these tangled, raped mothers at our heels” in the poem “yellow flowers in sea-water hair”. Zuwayo and Finlay evoke the sense of a lost innocence in play of thought and the imagination, a response, perhaps to the darker themes of the work. However, the lack of an identifiable subject or locus in many of the poems means that the images often disperse almost as soon as they are discovered, and the ideas in the poems remain somewhat insubstantial.
Terrestrial Things
By Ingrid de Kock
Kwela and Snailpress 2002
b>Reviewed by Jane Rosenthal
“Watchful tyrants, righteous as angels,” is how De Kok, in this her thirdcollection of poems, describes cypresses in an Italian cemetery. Whether sheis writing about these or truck drivers in South Africa, de Kok seems tohave the knack, surprising and satisfying, of saying what one always knew,but never really thought about till one found it in one of her poems. Shecaptures, unpretentiously and seemingly simply, many moments we have shared,and the four sections of the volume, which seem entirely disconnected, soonprove not to be.In “Foreign and Familiar” we recognise, in a poem called “Merchants ofVenice,” the African street-traders of our cities, now also in Italy. Shereaches back into the classical past and unites it with emergent Africa,revealing a new take on the age-old relationship between Africa and Europe.She juxtaposes the bitter, shattering experiences of the TRC testimonies inthe section called “A Room Full of Questions,” with the apparently clear,light poems of “Stretched Horizon”: “safest white childhood of the fifties,” and allows her readers to share both extremes of South Africanways of being. Whereas the TRC poems speak often of the unbearable andinexpressible, the childhood memories too have a share of difficulty andloss, acknowledging simultaneously her innocence and her ignorance, sharedby those like her, growing up white in the fifties.In the final five poems, grouped under the title, “Freight” she signalswhere we are now with the Aids pandemic; freight invokes both the hugeburden of this knowledge as well as the journey we have yet to make, thelong haul ahead.The last stanza of The child at the lights reads:
For two hundred orphansWill soon be there, waiting for red.In a long line their needs already sway.Their satchels are packed withTwo thousand brothers and sisters.Two million more are in the wings.
Rich and pertinent, this collection will be treasured in years to come forits clarity and honesty.