Breyten Breytenbach’s umpteenth collection of poetry is not a slender volume. And yet, for me, it felt short — it’s the first poetry collection in ages that I’ve read straight through, from front to back. The poems seem to flow into one another, an impression encouraged by their open-endedness and looseness, though the book as a whole has its own order. As with many previous collections of his, it has an oopmaakgedig, an opening poem (daar is geen tyd) that acts as a kind of introduction to the volume. Here, though, lines from that poem ingeniously recur to label the various sections into which the book is divided. For instance, section seven is titled ‘akkediskak [lizard shit]” after the last line of the introductory poem, and subtitled, in brackets, in another phrase from the poem, ‘die ewigdurende galmende momentum van stilte [the everlasting reverberating momentum of silence]”.
The sections loosely group poems on themes such as love, places, memory, silence, decay, death and poetry-making, though the sections overlap and the different poems speak to one another. Breytenbach’s familiar voice or range of voices moves through them, with his peculiar mixture of a directness of address and a surreal conjuring with imagery. His birds and dogs are all present. One of his personae in Die Windvanger is ‘Woordfoël” — Word-bird (voël) or perhaps, in a translinguistic pun, Word-fool. His poetic ‘ek” is also the Fool of the Tarot, always just embarking on a journey (inner or outer), one foot on the edge of a precipice as he gazes upward at the sky. And, of course, with a dog biting at the arse of his patched-together harlequin outfit.
Breytenbach has mused on death before, but here it seems a stronger thread than hitherto. Time is short — ‘daar is geen tyd”. In one poem, the ‘dead poet”, still musing, swims out to sea; in the last poem in the book the poet wonders, half-ironically, whether the time hasn’t come to put down his ‘last thought”. But he asks, too, in Zen style, ‘Wat sal ‘n laaste gedagte tog wees? Wie sal dit dink? [What would a last thought be? Who will think it?]”
Against the encroachment of death, the ultimate of all the absences or erasures around which Breytenbach has written, he places love and poetry itself. Love has always been one of his recurrent themes, and the love of an individual, with its sensual experience, blurs in his work into what one might call a love of the world, a broader, almost existential sensuality — an intense awareness of life and feeling, however evanescent. In fact, its evanescence is part of what makes it worth experiencing. For Breytenbach, ‘die lekkerste stuk lewe is die laaste” — the best part of life is the last, as when the trembling finger scratches the final marrow from a bone.
The ‘windvanger” catches the wind, or tries to; that effort, Breytenbach would probably say, at least on the evidence of these poems, is poetry. The looseness of the poems, their sense of consciousness momentarily arrested in word and image, without the imposition of tight, inherited form, attest to this. He performs this task of wind-catching with all the linguistic richness at his disposal. His rhythms shift constantly, sometimes rising towards incantation; he plays with words endlessly, generating puns and neologisms — up to the point where, in Koong Byten 1, he appears to have coined a new Afrikaans, both intensely childlike and highly sophisticated.
Wilma Stockenström contends with Breytenbach for the title of greatest living Afrikaans poet, or at least their supporters make such claims — Tim Huisamen, quoting André Brink in 1984 (when Breytenbach was not long out of jail, and not yet writing again in Afrikaans), makes that claim for Stockenström, and Ampie Coetzee makes it for Breytenbach on the jacket-flap of Die Windvanger. There’s not much point in trying to arbitrate the contest of greatness, if it is a contest; they are both (as Rebecca West said of EM Forster) at least semi-finalists.
The Wisdom of Water is the first selection of Stockenström’s poetry to appear in English, in translations by her acclaimed fellow-poet Johann de Lange. She is perhaps best known to anglophone readers for her short novel The Expedition to the Baobab Tree, in JM Coetzee’s translation, but her poetry is well worth encountering. This volume selects poems from each of seven collections, going back to 1970’s Vir die Bysiende Leser (For the Myopic — or Attentive — Reader) to 1999’s Spesmase (Inklings).
Stockenström’s language has a kind of hardness about it, and a sort of glitter. It’s like ore glimpsed in stone. (This despite her fascination with water.) She is an intensely thoughtful poet, aware always of humanity’s smallness in the context of our vast continent, amid the panoply of nature and within the immensity of the universe itself. An early verse is pretty much a praise-poem to a rock; in a later work, she bluntly states, ‘Sadly men aren’t trees.” But she also celebrates the ‘miraculousness of the body” (appending, parenthetically, ‘Of carcasses for vultures not today”), and is painfully alive to human suffering, as in the final poem here, The Comet Visits the Cape of Rape.
By contrast with Stockenström’s, Gail Dendy’s poetry has an ease about it, a quality that, in musical terms, one might call cantabile. The phrases unfold singingly, and her metaphors have a persuasive logic. Her language is precise yet elusive.
The poems seem to develop out of situations or conditions rather than observations as such; that some of these situations might be fictional is no problem. In Leaving, it is ‘A man bundling up the volume of his life / then slinging it across his back / as he leaves for the station”; in one of several poems about illness, ‘My sick ward is a butterfly one day old / and counting …”
Dendy also has a ventriloquistic gift, putting words in the mouths of the pope’s cobbler, for instance, or the ‘lady missionary” of the title, whose ambitions for Africa seem both laudable and pathetically ambitious. Dendy’s poems on ageing relatives and one on a father’s injury (Circular Saw) are very strong, and the book’s final (and longest) poem intuits and re-imagines a meeting between her parents, very movingly indeed.
Stockenström worked as an actor, and her sense of how the poor player humanity acts out its being informs one of her best poems, Ecce Homo, collected in The Wisdom of Water. Dendy has been a dancer, and yet there are few references to dancing in The Lady Missionary, though one poem, in the voice of Lot’s wife, poignantly expresses a desire to dance. Overall, the poems themselves dance beautifully.