An infinite variety of form: A review of Allan Kolski Horwitz's There are Two Birds at my Window

When you scan the title of this volume, you make an important discovery: the personal pronoun is unstressed, and that is the key to appreciating a remarkable poet. The stressed parts are the two birds and the window. The birds symbolise the world and the soul; the window is the threshold, the veil, where art and nature merge. Horwitz is a poet of what Keats called “gusto”, that is a recognition of the necessity of opposites, as binaries (the world) and as paradoxes (the soul).

The first poem, “Mzansi, my Beginning – Mzansi, my End”, alludes to Allen Ginsberg – another Jewish poet a long way from his spiritual home in the desert where you lose yourself to find yourself....Read more here

Protest poetry, by Kulani Nkuna

Allen Kolski Horwitz has to be one of the most erudite writers in post-apartheid South Africa.

Horwitz is an incisive observer of the South African political and social condition through his creative works which include plays like Comrade Babble, poetry, and fiction.

He has produced works with the Botsotso Jesters poetry performance group and Botsotso Publishing, which featured voices that seldom get heard in the mainstream.

He has also just released his latest collection of short fiction, Meditations Of A Non-White White, which he describes as “stories that scrape away superficial assumptions; bringing to life a multitude of characters whose issues and concerns have dominated post-1994 South Africa but are in many respects timeless.

"They probe the limitations of middle-class norms and blinkered identities; they grapple with the diverse 
experiences of those living beyond privileged ghettos”.

Another new release is a book of poetry called There Are Two Birds At My Window.

While he is heralded as a political poet, Horwitz also casts his eye over human pleasures, desires, love and struggles.

A poem titled Drunken Need jumps out of the page on an abstract level with an interesting second line that includes the phrase, “tongue-tying muse.”

“Drunken Need is all about the inspiration to write and the intoxication associated with writing,” explains Horwitz.

“There aren’t a lot of experiences that thrill me more than writing something and then marvelling at the end product. And it is funny, because you become inarticulate about that feeling, that rush of creation,” he says.

“That was the real impulse behind this poem. It was almost like an illicit relationship – the tension between the writer and the inspiration to write.

It is at an abstract level, but it is very real to me at the same time.”

Then there are other poems, which speak of the state of South Africa since 1994 like Mzansi, My Beginning – Mzansi My End, which talks of the almost schizophrenic existence of being in South Africa as it is today.

The role of the poet in a post-struggle situation is not as prevalent as during the struggle years, but according to Horwitz, there are injustices that still have to be corrected within the current political dispensation.  

“We have lived through 18 years of the national democratic revolution, which has sharpened  economic inequalities, and instead of making progress in closing the income inequalities, those gaps have widened,” he says.

“It is astonishing that the liberation movement is in power but many people are still stuck in poverty. So my poetry still has that political context and listening to other poets like Lesego Rampolokeng and Nova Masango, you will pick up that political aspect in their work as well. Poetry is not as widespread as it was back then, but its role is still significant.”

Sales of some local authors are not particularly good, with overseas titles achieving more success (think of Fifty Shades Of Grey or the Twilight books).

Horwitz attributes this to South Africa’s disturbing lack of self-regard.

“We still have a colonial culture,” he says.

“We are still dominated by the need for approval regarding what we are doing from the outside, more specifically Europe and the United States. We don’t yet have a full sense of our own value.

“Our inner sense of worth was shattered and Biko recognised that we have not changed fundamental psychological relationships between the coloniser and the colonised.”

(Published in The Citizen, October 29,2012)

A review of Allan Kolski Horwitz's There are Two Birds at my Window, by Dorian Haarhoff

There is something of the archer in a poet – letting the arrow fly along the length of an arm. Horwitz’s poems land quivering in many targets.

 Arrows feature in the poems – in San rock art and in a bow drawn beyond breaking point. The 80-plus poems cover a wide range – Addis airport, whales in False Bay, hippos. There are odes to international figures – Neruda, Freud, Kazantzakis – and to South Africans – Abdullah Ibrahim, Ingrid Jonker, Josiah Madsunya – poignant poems.

Then there are the more overt offering - love poems and those that express the continued anger of the protest tradition: forced removals, maintenance courts, Steve Biko, refuges, census.  These perhaps find their strength in performance. Most poems reach their targets.    

(Published in Cape Times, September 14,2012)

Book launch: donga, There Are Two Birds At My Window, Meditations of a Non-White White and Botsotso #16

Forthcoming titles from Dye Hard Press: There Are Two Birds At My Window and Meditations of a Non-White White, by Allan Kolski Horwitz

There Are Two Birds At My Window is Allan Kolski's Horwitz's new poetry collection, 169 pages. 

Meditations of a Non-White White is Allan Kolski Horwitz's new collection of short fiction, 272 pages.

Both titles are due to be published at the end of April 2012.