Kerry Hammerton’s fourth volume of poems deals with spatial transformation – and the consciousness of animals: a review of Kerry Hammerton's afterwards by Gary Cummiskey

 

My review of Kerry Hammerton's latest poetry collection, afterwards, that appeared on Media24. There is a paywall, but you can subscribe for 14 days for free.

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.

The dream continues...

Review of Bread, Philip Hammial, Black Pepper, Victoria, Australia, 2000.

Open this collection of surreal poems and witness an array of sardonic humour and a relentless assault on an objective, consumerist-driven reality. Hammial - as poet and outsider artist - takes a step away from the mainstream and follows his own path, a refreshing stance even for much contemporary surrealist poetry, which suffers from an insistence on clinging to tradition.

Hammial’s work combines a streetwise irreverence with an intellectual sharp-wittedness, yet nevertheless retains an elusive quality that is difficult to pinpoint.

Some of the poems have a collage-like character, containing dream images running into each other with narratives either being disrupted or operating on several levels simultaneously. In the opening poem ‘Autumnal’, we discover:

His
only crime: he refused to meet The Season
head-on, would only from the side, as do sea chariots
when they menace - bathers in flight, run straight
into the arms of a gang on the beach, bikers
kneeling on sand - Let us pray...

In ‘Correspondence’ the dream continues with a party full of complete strangers, a cyanide capsule and the recurrently haunting phrase ‘Their nourishment comes from elsewhere’. In another poem, ‘Floating’, the poet watches various corpses floating by and overcomes the temptation to become a corpse himself, ‘to go floating off, destination / unknown, without a care in the world’.

In a couple of poems, disconnected phrases are brought together to build up a logic of their own:

Wear bibs for sex.
Have gladiola manners.
Give vent to the patter of paterfamilias.
Are please when camels kneel..

(Colonel)

From literal mud he crawled to run with literal dogs in.
The time it takes to tow a mother.
Hooded emissaries bring out their tubes for a blow.
At which point the hunting starts to complain...

(Chassé)

In ‘Me, Myself, No Other’ various personalities burst out all at once, revealing an angry schizophrenia insisting on its singularity of identity:

& myself, no
other who, coming among strangers,
can understand their language as if
it was my own, their discourse
of dead horses, of empire, of excrement
& tedium...

This is the sickness of an insane society utterly convinced of its sanity. Eventually though, as the poem concludes, it is an insanity that ‘will place on the lips/of each of my comrades a kiss/of betrayal’.

The exposure of a self-deluded society and the abuse of power by governments continues in other poems, such as ‘Not me, him’, ‘Bread’, ‘Heads of State’ and ‘Law’. Christianity comes under particular attack, whether tacitly or explicitly, as in the satirical short poem ‘Last Supper’:

On twelve plates twelve pills.
Pink pills on green plates.
A thumbs up from the host means to swallow.
Eleven do, with wine to wash it down.
One refuses. Demands & gets
on a pink plate a green pill.

Hammial is not shy in his assaults, neither is he afraid to display ‘sick’ humour as in ‘Custodians’, ‘What to Say’ or in ‘Problems/Solutions’: ‘Judges eradicate damsel distress./ Grade rape from one to five.’ Hammial is always provocative, but our complacent psyches - often unable to question the flimsiest of deceptions - are in need of a good shake up.

Some of the best poems in this collection are a series of prose poems that could be categorised as scripts for surrealist happenings. ‘Problems/Solutions’ recommends: ‘Set fire to your toothpaste’ while others are more elaborate:

Call the spirits of the dead. When they arrive, complaining about the poor treatment that they had from their relatives when they were alive, put brown paper bags over their heads &, as though applauding, pop them.

(Procedures)

Hammial is not a poet for everyone, and certainly not for those with their heads in the sand. Most of his poems demand several readings and if they are occasionally shocking, they are nevertheless always thought-provoking and enjoyable.

(Previously unpublished)

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.

No flash in the pan, this fiction

Review of 100 Papers, Liesl Jobson, Botsotso Publishing, Out of the Wreckage, Allan Kolski Horwitz, Botsotso Publishing, Botsotso 15: Jozi Spoken Word Special Edition

Flash fiction — essentially a very short story, which can range from about 10 lines to four pages — might be regarded as the ideal kind of genre for our rushed, fast-paced times. But it is as ancient as Aesop, and was practised by writers such as Anton Chekhov and Ernest Hemingway.

South African Liesl Jobson has just published her debut volume, 100 Papers, which consists of 100 prose poems and flash fiction pieces. The opening piece in her collection, Shopping List, sets the tone for many of the other stories with its strong sense of the understated, of what is not being said, of unspoken and unresolved tensions.

It also introduces the theme of relationships, motherhood and loneliness, although some of the stories are fairly lighthearted, such as How the Oreo Stole Christmas and Bridgework.

And, not surprisingly, considering Jobson’s career as a bassoonist, many of them feature orchestral musicians, such as Bassoon Lesson, Perfect Timing, Zebra Breath, and She Cannot Love Her Own Air.

Notable flash fiction pieces in the collection are Litter-Bugs, Spider Salad, Bump, Saviour, Cell, My Mother’s Diary, Vessel and Green Socks, White Lies.

But the strongest items are the prose poems, such as Naysayers, A Hundred Times a Day, In the Biscuits, Sun-Dried Tomatoes, The Corner of My Eye, and Under My SAPS Star, though sometimes the distinction between the very short flash fictions and the prose poems are not so clear, such as with Cell — a mere 17 lines and clearly a narrative — and Vessel, which is one-and-a-half pages but reads like a prose poem.

This is a welcomed debut volume. A slight problem is the fact that the strongest pieces are mainly in the second half.

Botsotso editor Allan Kolski Horwitz’s Out of the Wreckage is also a collection of very short fiction, predominantly a series of “dream parables” involving a male character named Abel.
They are surreal tales which the blurb says consist of “the dream-like; the waking fantasy; the reverie; the parable that instructs; the story that informs … the dream that saves the dreamer”.

Like Jobson’s volume, most of the pieces are not longer than three to four pages, and one piece, Excursion, is only 19 lines. Some are more conventional short-story narratives, two of which — Blue and Ashford — appeared in a previous Botsotso anthology of short fiction, Unity in Flight.

The collection starts off promisingly with The President, a powerful, all-too-familiar story of a despot determined to hold onto power while his country goes to ruin.

Despite the dream-like atmosphere throughout the volume, the realities of a contemporary violent society are sometimes not too far away — one of the pieces is called War Time.

While some of the other dream parables are strong — such as Discover, The Dog, Accidents, Out of the Wreckage, The Festival and She Was Taken Captive — the most rewarding pieces are the more conventional stories, such as The Tap Plant, A Faraway Shopping Centre, Four Seasons, Gerhard, Blue, Ashford, Mystery in the Cottage and She Whom I Love.

The concept of the dream narrative is fascinating, but the overall feeling with Out of the Wreckage is that of overkill. If the number of dream parables had been reduced, or if there were more conventional stories to create a balance, the book might have been more effective.

The 15th issue of literary journal Botsotso is a special edition, with about half of its 200 pages selections of material presented at the first Jozi Spoken Word festival, which took place over four days at Wits University last year.

There is commentary from critics such as Anthea Buys and Darryl Accone and papers on Who Makes or Breaks the Canon? by James Ogude and Rosemary Gray, which were originally part of a panel discussion at the festival.

There are poems by Angifi Dladla, Hugh Lewin, Mak Manaka, Ike Mboneni Muila, Siphiwe ka Ngwenya, Peter Horn, Mphutlane wa Bofelo and Dennis Brutus, as well as short fiction by Achmat Dangor, Horwitz and Jobson.

The second section contains new work ranging from short fiction by Zukiswa Wanner, Jean-Francois Kouadio, Hlengiwe Mnguni and Arja Salafranca, to poetry from Alan Finlay, Brent Meersman, Elizabeth Trew and Dave Stevens.

The volume is illustrated throughout with a powerful graphics series called Xnau by Garth Erasmus, which are the result of flame on paper and show mysterious black and white shapes suggesting figures or skeleton-like bones.

In SA, where literary journals are scarce and constantly struggling for survival, it is encouraging to see Botsotso not only still publishing, but also growing stronger and publishing such rewarding, innovative and imaginative work.

(First published in The Weekender September 20, 2008)