Book Launch | (don’t fall, ma said) by Alan Finlay

David Krut Books excitedly reopened for the year last week, and we launched right into things with the book launch of Alan Finlay’s latest poetry collection (don’t fall, ma said).

Alan Finlay has had six collections of poetry published by small presses. He founded the literary journal Bleksem, was co-editor of donga, and was editor of New Coin from 2003 to 2007. For the past ten years he has lived in Argentina.

(don’t fall, ma said) is a memoir in 25 poems that records Finlay’s childhood experience when his family lived in Honeydew outside Johannesburg. In stark images and the blunt tones of South African dialogue, the poems show scenes of daily life – family, primary school, horses, teachers, grandparents, neighbours, farm workers and friends – to evoke the atmosphere of a white boyhood in the 1970s to early-1980s.

Finlay read six poems from his collection, starting with Barbered Wire (pg. 9) which sets the scene for the poet’s childhood growing up in what was then rural Honeydew, a place of peach trees, apple trees, apricot trees and more. he went on to read poems about his teachers (Mejuffrou Els, pg.22), his neighbours (Mr Landman. pg. 34), and time spent with his dad (Outride, pg. 91). Each poem painted a picture of a different time, of the poet’s childhood in a different world.

When asked about why he chose to write this book now, he confessed that it was something that he had always been trying to write, he just never could. In recent years, however, something clicked, he finally found the perspective from which to write.