Physical and spiritual merge in the world of Mxolisi Nyezwa's uprbringing: a review of Mxolisi Nyezwa's Bhlawa's Inconsolable Spirits, by Gary Cummiskey

 

Not only is Bhlawa’s Inconsolable Spirits the first book that poet Mxolisi Nyezwa has published in six years, but it is also his first prose work. Autobiographical in nature, it traces the development of the young Mxolisi from childhood to adulthood and is set mainly in the township of Bhlawa, previously New Brighton, where the author has spent most of his life. ..Read more at Media24.

Review of Bloodred Dragonflies, Jim Pascual Agustin: published in Stanzas 27

Review of Bloodred Dragonflies, Jim Pascual Agustin, deep south, 2022

Review by Gary Cummiskey, published in Stanzas 27

 

A man arrives in South Africa in 1994. He is from the Philippines, an archipelago of islands with a history of colonial oppression and the object of a tug-of-war between Spain and the US a hundred years ago. And having shaken of the colonial yoke, the islands then became subjected to a series of dictatorships and rampant corruption. It’s something that sounds somewhat familiar.

This is no doubt why Jim Pascual Agustin’s latest poetry collection – his first to be published in South Africa – resonates within the contemporary South African context, since both the subjects and imagery remind us of our own history and more recent tribulations.

The first poems in this collection, such as ‘After the First Monsoon Rain’, ‘The Crabs’ and ‘Naartjie’ deal with childhood, but even within this cocoon of innocence the outside world of pain, fear and violence occasionally intrudes, such as in ‘You Had to Leave’, which starts: ‘Nightmares no longer scare you / like they used to’, or more strikingly in ‘Seeing in the Dark’, in which the child is given the following prophecy:

you will leave your country

stare loneliness in the eye

bury the dead among the living …

Indeed, it is only a few poems later that violence and oppression burst into the poet’s consciousness, and the past world of innocence is crushed like his family’s house in ‘Dragonflies’:        

                                       

The government didn’t just tear down

its foundations. They buried it

under twenty feet of soil.

 

And in ‘Face in the Tar’ the children of the dictator are showered with lavish gifts while ordinary citizens go without, and anyone who dares speak out will ‘disappear from their homes and be found / floating down a river …’ But life still continues under such conditions, and the poet even undergoes military conscription, wearing: 

Hand-me-down boots

deep jungle green

a size too big, reeking of memories

of someone else’s feet.

 (‘Citizens Military Training’)

Not surprisingly, there is also the rousing voice of resistance, as in ‘Defiance’ or ‘We Will Not Allow The Dead To Be Silenced’:

 Though the dead may be left

unclaimed in morgues

or dumped on the side of the road,

their faces bound with packaged tape,

 

they will never be silenced … 

But Agustin does not focus solely on contrasting worlds of innocence and (political) experience ‒ to do might risk becoming formulaic, predictable and one dimensional. In the second part of the collection there are poems more intimate in tone, with memories of his father, such as ‘Rats’ and ‘My  Father, Leaving’ , or meditations on aging and mortality, such as ‘Angels of the Old Cemetery’ or the somewhat alarming ‘What I’ve Always Been’:

someone who loses and gains

all the time. Not seeming to care

 

or able to see an oncoming train

on its side, the ground grating

against its metal skin, screams

twisting on the tracks …

 

The collection consists of both new and selected poems – some written in English and others translated from the Filipino ‒ though with the exception of some giveaway poems, such as ‘Sunday, Rondebosch’ and ‘The Undiminished’, it is not clear which are older poems, perhaps written before his arrival in South Africa, and those written since living here. ‘The Undiminished’, for example, opens with a description of a clearly recognisable South African suburban peak-hour rush to work: 

                                …. a dash to join

others who wait in line

 

for a taxi packed beyond capacity.

Always, the unavoidable

pressing of skin against skin, sharing

the scent of familiar strangers.

 

An eternity to get to work …

Considering Bloodred Dragonflies is a selected volume, it is a pity there is not a greater number of poems – I certainly wanted to read more.

A Dye Hard Interview: Richard Fox: Engaging with language

Richard Fox was born in Cape Town in 1975. He lives in Johannesburg and runs the T-shirt company T-Shirt Terrorist. His first collection of poems, 876, was published in 2007, and his second collection, otherwise you well?, was published by deep south in 2021. He has had poems published in journals such as New Coin, Ons Klyntji, Carapace and donga, and in the anthologies it all begins and glass jars among trees.

otherwise you well? is your second collection. Your first, 876, came out in 2007. I remember you had stopped writing for a while, and it was around 2013 that you started up again. Was there any reason for that period of silence?

I did take a hiatus; I think it was around 2002 though, and it lasted until 2006/2007, just before the release of 876. This was a difficult period for me. I was ‘going through changes’. The poetry in 876 was written between 1997 and 2001, most of that body in the last six months of 2001. This was the year I cancelled my corporate subscription with the world – I resigned from my job and holed out in a garden cottage at the back on my parent’s property, stayed up late, did all kinds of weird stuff, and wrote .. More.

A Dye Hard Interview: Dimakatso Sedite: With poetry, there is nowhere to hide

Dimakatso Sedite was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa. Her poetry has appeared in Teesta Review, Brittle Paper, New Coin, Stanzas, Kalahari Review, BKO, Botsotso, Aerodrome, BNAP and elsewhere. She was the joint winner of the 2019 DALRO Prize. She holds an MA in Research Psychology from the University of the Witwatersrand. Yellow Shade (Deep South, 2021) is her first book of poems

Yellow Shade is your first collection, but I am curious about how long you have been writing for.

I have been writing intermittently for myself since I was about 19 years old, or even earlier, if the short story I wrote when I was 10 is anything to go by. I would write mainly short stories and some poems, throughout my 20s and 30s, but did not see myself as a writer by any stretch. It was only in 2016, 27 years later, that I decided to submit my work for publication in journals. So, in that way, I’m a bit of an anomaly. All poems in this book were written between 2016 and 2020. Read more.

Launch of Bilakhulu by Vonani Bila

Deep South Publishers & David Krut Bookstore invite you to the launch of BILAKHULU! Longer Poems by Vonani Bila

Johannesburg Tuesday 28 July at 6pm
David Krut Bookstore, 151 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood
Enquiries 011 880 5648 or 071 686 6128

Vonani Bila's voice in Bilakhulu! is as buoyant and direct as ever; his emotional range is broad, incorporating humour and lament. These seven narrative poems, ranging from 3 to 35 pages in length, are grounded in the poet’s family and village, at the same time making visible the wider forces that impinge on rural life.

Bila is a driving force in South African poetry – founding editor of Timbila poetry journal, publisher of Timbila Books and founder of Timbila Writers’ Village. He is the author of five books of poems in English and eight story-books for newly literate adult readers in English, Sepedi, and Xitsonga. Vonani Bila teaches in the Department of English Studies at the University of Limpopo, and in the MA in Creative Writing at Rhodes University. He lives with his wife and three children in Shirley Village, Elim, Limpopo.

Bila was also the previous editor of New Coin.

ISBN: 978-0-9870282-5-9
96 pages 205 x 140 mm
Price R120
Cover art by Colbert Mashile

Head on Fire: Rants/Notes/Poems 2001-2011 by Lesego Rampolokeng

 ISBN: 978-0-9870282-0-4. 

Published by Deep South, Grahamstown,2012.

For order details, email r.berold@gmail.com

Malikhanye by Mxolisi Nyezwa

Malikhanye is the third collection 

by South African poet Mxolisi Nyezwa,
published by Deep South, 2011.  

"Nyezwa's poems are both violent and tender,
with an immediacy of language that strikes
the reader like a cry, or note of music."

978-0-9584915-9-4

all i can make of my country

is a sulphurous compound

a black room with two gigantic stars

as thoroughly silent as corpses

and during the many storms in my life

what happened?

what really happened?

during those nights

what did I really see?

The book is available from bookstores, or order directly from Deep South. Contact r.berold@gmail.com for order details.

The Melville Poetry Festival 2011

Just some events at the Melville Poetry Festival on Saturday October 15 include the launch of Gail Dendy's Closer Than That, a panel discussion on 'The Ghost of Wopko Jensma', and poetry by Gary Cummiskey, Arja Salafranca, Victor Khulile Nxumalo, Kobus Moolman, Rene Bohnen, Bernat Kruger and Alan Finlay. Deep South will also be launching new titles by Mxolisi Nyezwa and Rosamund Stamford.

The Hurricurrent by Rosamund Stanford

The Hurricurrent is a new collection of poems by Rosamund Stanford, published by Deep South.

"Living in comparative isolation helps me free the tide of feelings that's swept me to my present place. My editing skills desert me when I look at my unruly lines, as if my poems are afraid  of my often stony eye."


ISBN: 978-0-9584915-8-7

Available from Deep South, email r.berold@gmail.com to order

Independent publishers: how do they survive? Janet van Eeden interviews Deep South's Robert Berold

Janet: Robert, can you tell us a bit about your publishing house? What did you set out to achieve when you started publishing and how long have you been going?

Robert I started Deep South with Paul Wessels in 1995. At the time I was editing New Coin. Seitlhamo Motsapi, whose brilliant poems had been appearing in New Coin, told me he couldn’t find any publisher to take on his work. I was so outraged that I went to Paul and said we have to go into publishing. Our next book, Ari Sitas’s Slave Trades, was published a whole five years later. So in a way we only started in 2000. From 2003 I ran Deep South on my own...Read more here

Invitation to the launch of pushing from the riverbank by alan finlay, at Love Books, Melville, Johannesburg, February 22

Light and After by Kobus Moolman

New poems from Pietermaritzburg poet Kobus Moolman, published by Deep South. Contact r.berold@gmail.com for order details.

Sunnyside Sal - Anton Krueger

Anton Krueger's debut novel Sunnyside Sal is published by Deep South. It is a tale of the friendship between two boys brought up during the dying years of apartheid and the first years of the new SA. It traces their lives as fortunes and choices change, producing many moments of comedy and sadness along the way.

Some of Krueger's poems have appeared in Green Dragon.

Rich imagery and a sense of place

Review of All The Days, Robert Berold, Deep South, and Never, Bernat Kruger,Deep South

ALL the Days is Robert Berold’s fourth collection of poetry, and it is written with striking clarity and lucidity of language.

The poems display an awareness of the fleetingness of time, of the transitory nature of life and approaching old age: all embraced by Berold with a calm, Taoist-like wisdom — there is a quote from Lao Tsu at the beginning of one poem and another is titled The Book of Changes.

These themes reveal themselves immediately, as in the first poem, The Water Running, which traces constant movement and change: “the water running in the gullies/the hoopoe bobbing flying off abruptly/the sky full of leftover rain/… the bakkie loaded up for town/the pipes and ditches swollen with water”.

The second poem, Half-light, shows a traditional Chinese influence in its brevity and simple description of a rural landscape: “morning half-light, meeting/two foxes on the farm road, crossing the railway line, turning/to the white moon”.

Most of the poems display a strong sense of place, whether it be the rural landscape of Eastern Cape, Johannesburg or even China, where Berold taught English for a year .

A few poems in the collection are lighthearted, such as Why I am not an Engineer; the sound poem Two Cats; and Proposal, where Berold writes that he is “becoming an extension of my computer/… I’m wired up the world. I can communicate with china, it’s only/a six hour time difference. It’s the cultural time difference/that makes it difficult, and the fact that their rivers are toxic”.

But even in Berold’s lightheartedness there is an intimate warmth that shines through, as in To my Room, the place where he has “spent three thousand nights in your arms./You have absorbed my snoring and my dreams”.

The strongest poems are those that deal with the past and trace the poet’s history, as in Written on my Father’s Birthday, Sweetpeas, My Bakkie, To myself at 20, or Journey, where the poet visits “Hillbrow. Wanderers Street./Taxi-blasted chickens stand in cages./I was born there. Florence Nightingale Hospital./It used to be a dreamy flatland of pensioners/and nurses”.

The powerful narrative, Visit to my Mother, highlights the difficulties in trying to maintain relations with an older, more politically conservative generation.

Never is Bernat Kruger’s debut collection of poetry . Like Berold, Kruger’s work shows a strong awareness of the natural world, as well as geography, as is evident in poems such as Marienthal, Groblersdal, Limpopo and Iowa.

But there is also an awareness of an inner world, and the interplay between the two realities, as well as the vapid, transitory nature of the physical world, as in the title poem, which describes the poet stopping his car “to wade the knee-deep air-light fluff, this/curious relic left by a burst of rain lasting less than a/minute”.

Kruger’s world is characterised by precise, intricate, detailed description, as in the first poem, 20cm, which begins: “A morning mist leaving colours in blue tint/20cm from a window and any of my movements force/my left shoulder against glass”.

Several poems deal with travelling through SA’s rural areas, of farming co-ops and agricultural produce, as in the poem Iowa, which describes being “in the real world, heading for Wesselsbron — heading/for a crop meeting. Maize. Corn …”

There is also a strong awareness of the inherent political conservatism of the landscape — particularly in the poem Limpopo, which describes how the poet and a friend get lost and find themselves in an informal settlement.

Kruger’s intricate, rich imagery is sometimes difficult and few of the poems can be grasped initially; they demand a second reading.

For all the apparent natural description, there is a dreamlike sense of elusiveness and illusion, of another, interior-world reality peeping through.

Having followed Kruger’s work in literary journals over the past few years, I had expected something more substantial than Never’s 50 pages.

Published in The Weekender, November 22, 2008.