REVIEWSSKULL IN THE MUD, AND OTHERSA Ruthless Fidelity: The Collected Poems of Douglas Livingstone, edited by Malcolm Hacksley andDon Maclennan (Ad Donker/ Jonathan Ball, 2004)
Reviewed by masters student Nigel Bell from the Institute for the Study of English in Africa.
This is a splendid volume, in both appearance (with text designed by Michael Barnett, and a fine cover photograph of Douglas by Monica Fairall), and, of course, in substance.
We have here all the collections Douglas published during his lifetime (he died in early 1996), from The Skull in the Mud of 1960 to the tiny gathering (about two pages’ worth) of haikus he made in 1995 entitled Giovanni Jacopo Meditates (on the High-IQ Haiku). In addition there is a second section that includes the many published poems not in collections, and a third with as many unpublished poems selected from the hundreds Douglas left us.
The sheer abundance of imaginative riches, then, is astounding, and exploring them, for a reader unfamiliar, as this one is, with the whole range of the Livingstone oeuvre, a continuous revelation of their extraordinary variety and power. We know he was a distinguished marine biologist, with more than a hundred papers and a doctorate to his credit, and his intent investigative gaze, supported by an exceptionally resourceful vocabulary spanning both his professional and his literary interests, is at work throughout his poetry. But his humanist self was no less cultivated, with an allusive reach that ran from the classical era to his contemporaries. He looked, so to speak, through open windows as he worked, through which the light of recorded cultures, past and present, scientific and humane, streamed into his writing.
Science, as it happened, gave Douglas a perspective on the created world way back of the classical, deep into the dark abysm of time. And he took his marvellous wit back there, too, which in the case of animals meant noticing how to relate oddities of behaviour and appearance to our own. Here is part of his "Address to a Patrician at Station 8", from A Littoral Zone (1991):
Far out and unconfined, you mope
Old pea-brained survivor
--Latimeria chalumnae--
coping with four fin-feathered legs,
doing grave headstands in the dark,
armoured with condescension behind
the grim profile of a misanthrope.
• • •
What awes me—fish from long ago—
is not the muddying of your chaps
when waves clawed 200 metres up
or below today’s makeshift shores,
nor your changeless chinless lineage,
but your fathers squirting on eggs
to sire everyone I know.
It is impossible, in a few hundred words, to do more than glance at Douglas’s great qualities: his deep compassion, for example, whether for a suffering animal like the blue duiker, with his left hindleg "snared three days of sleepless terror" in the noose of a poacher "gone for weeks", who "will not be returning"; the little creature must gnaw himself free, and with water lying "a doubtful day away", he faces "a three-legged stumble through hyena-patrolled terrain" ("A Piece of Earth", from The Anvil’s Undertone, 1978). Or for someone like Mketwa, his tough, erratic companion in physical labour—"unkillable", Douglas thought, but he died in the street from a knife-wound (it was his own knife) in the chest. When the ambulance came, it "bore his corpse away, not out of my life" ("Dust", from The Anvil’s Undertone).
He cared deeply for the victims of the world’s cruel, implacable forces ("Holocaust heaps…carcinomas / in children, floods, quakes…"), and he prayed that the God who presided over these and other horrors should "make poems within me" (‘Descent from the Tower’, from A Littoral Zone). Douglas had no appetite for political action, but he was not a passive observer of the world. He fought, sceptically but valiantly, with the weapons he had to hand—for truth, for the welfare of the fragile and beautiful blue cell in space we momentarily cling to, and for the love he had for animals and particular people (especially women). His weapons, and his witness, were his poems.
A THOUSAND DEMONS RELEASEDMy Ghost in the Bush of Lies by Paul Wessels (deep south publishing) (Some sort of Skin)
Reviewed by Anton R. Krueger, Phd student in playwriting and lecturer at the University of Pretoria
"I need some sort of skin. I’m all out of my own."
South Africa’s hardcore poet of the outer edges of despair has produced an unstoppable, genre-defying assault on the senses. He has covered his soul in an explosion of texts, in a multitude of meanings. Paul Wessels has become legion, he has released a thousand demons.
Every word is precise, and each page has been honed down to the barest essentials, and yet the language still seems excessive. Sentences slip and spill off the page. Here are dreams, and pornographic letters; book reviews and e-mails from his mother. Here are orgies and theatre and trials in a court of law. Here are the dark themes of a white South African unconscious – the farm, the border. Here is war and sex and philosophy. We encounter new perspectives on de Sade, Baudrillard, JM Coetzee and Deleuze & Guattari. Nietzsche is everywhere. Occasionally the moon wrestles itself free of clouds and the author’s beautiful, cold poetry shines through.
Inside this dark dream we encounter a plethora of Pauls – from the Road to Damascus to Valery to Paulus Nomad to Wessels. It seems to be a kind of "factless autobiography" (to redefine Pessoa’s term), in that it reveals Wessels as a diffuse collection of warring texts, which makes a mockery of any desire for the coherence and unity of identity. We could not get any closer to Wessels, nor any further away. In permitting this savage explosion, these fractured revelations, the author has also obliterated himself. Now we know everything and nothing. He has become the purest conduit of the messages which flow through him.
NIGHT IS REWRITING THE SKYPersonae by Sarah Johnson
Reviewed by Crystal Warren, poet and researcher in the National English Literary Museum (Nelm).
Personae is the first collection by Sarah Johnson and the third in the UCT Younger Poets series. Johnson might be young, but this does not detract from the power of her poems. Including religious aspects in poetry can be difficult, running the risk of reverting into piety or sentimentality. Yet Johnson incorporates religious images and adopts the voices of biblical characters to produce poems that are sensitive and moving, with a resonance beyond simply the spiritual.
While some poems are personal, in the majority she records the thoughts and actions of different people. In adopting personae, she gives voice to biblical figures such as Potiphar’s wife, Bathsheba and Delilah who attempt to explain their actions. In other scenes Ham is haunted by the image of a girl he once loved and Joseph ponders on the strange child in his care in At the Crib, ending with the chilling line "as morning feels its way past wood, this pot of nails."
Other poems explore creativity and writing. In Writer’s Block a writer fears that "forgetting how to sleep, / he will forget how to write. His fingers twitch / and the light skips from his pen". In Theomachy she records that "During church sometimes / I revise poems in my head" which enables her to see that outside "night is rewriting the sky".
Symposium is a longer sequence of voices laying bare all that is not said at a suburban dinner party, and incorporates some of the other themes of this collection, that of memory, loss and desire.
THE SONG EXISTS IN YOUR MINDBook of Songs by Shabbir Banoobhai
Reviewed by Jo Anne and Georgina Barrow, top Grade 11 English students at Grahamstown’s Diocesan School for Girls (DSG)
Book of Songs takes you on an evocative journey that uses lyrical poems as a vehicle to express the emotions and concepts that capture the essence of life’s experiences. The use of song enables us to be exposed to the variety of expressions in the anthology – songs of celebration, songs of solidarity, songs of lament and songs of love. It is the way in which the poems flow and sing that allow for the emergence of a simplicity and honesty only a song could offer.
The human experience is explored through a variety of themes that form the core of this experience – weaving together the political, social, religious and philosophical aspects of our human nature. Banoobhai uses intense emotion, personal relationships and his love of nature to portray everything that epitomises the essence of his songs. By reflecting his own life experiences, he presents us with little snatches of life so that each song may have universal meaning. It is this universal meaning that enables all readers to find something in a poem that sings to them.
Each poem is complemented with a photograph that mirrors and encapsulates the feel of the poem. They are all images of simplicity and beauty and, like the poems, each also uncovers a little snippet of life.
Poetry and pictures lead one to simple aspects of the human experience; each feeling and concept is linked with nature and gives us a sense of our synchronicity with the universe.
The poem Ruxanna, where Banoobhai indicates how even the strongest of love felt for a person is connected with the steady beating heart of nature, is especially captivating.
"i promise i will write you a love poem if you have not seen yourself in everything i write about, not seen yourself in the blue of the sky or the pain I may or may not have written about…"
The accessibility of the poems allows for anyone to be touched by them, no matter what life has tossed your way. We recommend that you discover the songs for yourself – because, as the Song of Creation sings: "There is only one song and no other song…the song that exists in your mind."
PILGRIMAGE FOR MUSLIMS AND THE RESTThe Mecca Diaries by Rayda Jacobs
Reviewed by Naseera Amod Omarjee, a fourth-year English major at Rhodes University.
Hajj is one of the five major pillars of Islam. It involves a pilgrimage to Mecca, the site of the Kaa’ba (the direction in which all Muslims pray) and the completion of various tasks.
This pilgrimage is compulsory for every Muslim who is physically and financially able. Jacobs’ book explores the preparation, the actual Hajj and the aftermath. Although the book is focused mainly on laying down the facts, Jacobs conveys not only the actual physical pilgrimage, but also the emotional, mental and spiritual journey that Hajj entails.
She begins the book describing her niyyah, or intention to undertake her pilgrimage. The intention is the first step, possibly the most important, and Jacobs explains the emotional impact that her decision made on her with clarity and poignancy.
She then explains the build-up, ensuring that there are no debts to settle and asking for forgiveness from all those you believe you have wronged, a basic cleansing of the soul.
She then describes her journey, first to Medina, the Prophet Muhammed’s (Peace be on Him) final resting place, and then to Mecca, where the Hajj begins.
Jacobs captures the experience with incredible accuracy. She describes every feeling and every experience, from the multi-racial crowds to the spiritual impact of the Hajj.
In giving an accurate description of a journey very few people are fortunate enough to experience, Jacobs creates empathy in the reader with incredible skill. It is accessible to both Muslims and non-Muslims and is an interesting and exciting read.
LAUGHING, CRYING
Nadine Botha: ants moving the house millimetres (poetry)
Grahamstown: deep south, 2005.
Reviewed by Marike Beyers from the National English Literary Museum
In ants moving the house millimetres Nadine Botha brings a wry voice, commenting on serious issues in an off-beat and often startling way.
The poems deal quite directly with modern urban life and an off-centre experience of the self. They give a playful and sometimes flippant grin at notions of belonging, of finding meaning in work and relations which can be only incidental. The poems deal with personal experience, observed sardonically -- "we do not contain our actions/but rather observe them as thought."
Word-play, humour and a sense of the absurd are interwoven in the poems, often lightening a subject that might otherwise have been mired in despair or shocking. For example, she describes the introspection in love relationships as "Self-prying abilities of (s)talking". It is also apparent in titles of poems that relate to the poem by association, commenting on the theme of the poem in surprising ways.
The poems deal with a woman in everyday city life without glamorising work as a way to attain a sense of community or an integrated meaning. The narrator speaks with the same intensity of the (ir)relevance of looking for an alarm clock, driving on the highway and encounters with lovers. Her approach in addressing matters relating to sexual relations and desire is unconventional in its frankness, even opening a poem with "I can’t stop thinking about sex." However, these relations or encounters are not separate from "You can sit alonest in a big city./In your room you are nowhere".
The poems come back to one on rereading in their questioning and exploration of being, of experiencing and trying to find ways of wording this in a language witty, wry and aware of its own limitations in forgetting and shaping the reality written about – "Knowing nothing while doing it".
INTO THE MAZE OF THE UNKNOWN & UNTOLDwhiteheart: prologue to hysteria byLesego Rampolokeng
Published by Deep South
Reviewed by poet Sonwabo Meyi
"But the "pot", jeepers creepers mandela’s slippers…"
I first met Lesego Rampolokeng’s poetry at a writing course I attended at Rhodes University. I got addicted & influenced & the effect still lingers alive inside me every consciousness. This new one is a book of prose. It starts in haze, gets hold of your every living part & lets your mind ride a maze. It picks up momentum & you swim along the poetical rhythm of the drum & bass while the dj scratches the record until it bleeds red yellow green blood. Lesego is the master of telling the untold and writing that which has never been written before.
He invites us to travel alongside him towards the deepest bowels of his memories & the images he has captured with his eyes are real. There is also sexuality synchronised with a devilish bliss.
As in all of his books, he does not fail to show disgust & rage towards the political systems of the world. Moreover, the rap & rhyme intertwined with the vivid images cause your whole internal system to shiver.
This book has made me believe that Lesego has a photographic memory. The words come at you like grotesque radical images straight into your imagination making you very afraid excited educated & emancipated all at once.
This one will attack infinite spaces silences through lengths & breadths of time.
