The carefully modulated surface of Stuart Payne’s poems belies the intriguing, startling and thought-provoking depths of thought and perception. Such deliberate tensioning between the obvious and the hidden allows him to craft finely judged poems that reward rereading. Whether evoking the touch of the sun or the sound of an old tape recording, his universe is both vivid and uncertain as past, present and future are considered and reconsidered, and the distance between minds is sensed and explored.
Charl-Pierre Naudé demonstrates that poetry problematises generally accepted truths, estranging it so that it may be experienced anew. In Naudé’s poetry the strangeness is important. Strange spaces are set foot upon to rediscover the known, by looking in from the outside as it were.
Arja Salafranca’s new poetry collection offers portraits of people on trains in England, as well as recounting the experience of being a stranger in Spain, where she was born.
William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience is a collection of poems which embodies not only the talents of a writer, but also those of an artist working in illuminated printing, applying words and pictures to copper plates with the surrounding surfaces etched away. There are twenty one copies of Songs of Innocence and twenty seven of the work as a whole, but no separate copies of Songs of Experience.
Contains interviews with and photographs of the 25 people who knew or worked with Roth during his time spent in Chicago, Providence, New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Many of the works Roth created during that period are illustrated here in full colour.
Never overburdened by earnestness, this guide to Sea Point for Residents and Visitors takes a good look at the hard questions by means of great entertainment.
The publication of inward moon, outward sun signals a welcome end to Shabbir Banoobhai’s self-imposed silence that lasted well over a decade. In the body of South African writing, his is a rare voice with the courage and the artistic skill to articulate a contemporary spirituality convincingly. The utmost simplicity of expression is used to conceal and reveal, at one and the same time, ideas of intense profundity. The poems are often meditative songs of love, longing and loss in a mystical world but they remain rooted in the social and political struggles of this world.
Lyric, vigilant, hyper-alert to the surfaces, textures and sensations of the physical world, the poems in Moolman’s sixth collection are beautiful and dangerous, a meditation on the fraught and even perilous relationship of mind and body.
Letotoba is a collection of 33 new poems that focuses on different themes namely; spiritual, relationships (love), politics, youth (June 16), inspiration and motivation.
‘Why bother to rob a bank, when you can own a bank?’ asked Bertold Brecht. The question is reiterated in the very Brechtian Love, Crime and Johannesburg, the story of Jimmy ‘Long Legs’ Mangane and the trouble he gets into in the new South Africa. Jimmy, a people’s poet involved in the struggle, is accused of robbing a bank. He passionately asserts his innocence, claiming to work for the ‘secret secret service’.
“for days i looked for my poems in the streets, and since i could not find them, light fell like a flower on the lonely square. – the light sounded the drum of a thud. beauty came grovelling forward begging, and children went for days without food.” * Poetry is a simple way to remind us of our humanity. It guards against placing blind faith in the sciences which are constricting to the human spirit. In poetry, we discover our basic selves. Intensely lyrical and deeply expressionist, the poems of New Country register the intuitiveness of Mxolisi Nyezwa’s vision of his land and his life. Nyezwa has carved for himself a voice and a style that is entirely his own and unlike any South African poet before him.
Penny Siopis’ Grief brings together a series of small glue and ink paintings on paper – occasionally with the addition of oil and collage elements – produced over a period of two years following the experience of devastating personal loss. The ‘Notes’ are bought together for the first time, accompanied by a poetic text by the artist that draws on writings by the likes of Mahmoud Darwish, Roland Barthes and Joan Didion on grief, concluding with Emily Dickinson:
Season South Africa is a major program of contemporary visual and performing arts that runs from September 2004 through January 2005. Launched by the Museum for African Art and The Cathedral of St. John the Divine during the year that South Africa is commemorating its first decade of democracy, Season South Africa showcases some of that country’s most gifted and acclaimed contemporary visual and performing artists chosen by an international team of curators.
