Launch of Kobus Moolman's Left Over and Khulile Nxumalo's fhedzi at Love Books, Melville, Johannesburg on July 25 2013

What I'm reading: Kobus Mooman

Poet Kobus Moolman was born in Pietermaritzburg in 1964. He has been awarded the Ingrid Jonker Prize, the Pansa award for best drama, the Dalro poetry prize and the South African Literary Award for poetry. He teaches creative writing at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban. He has just released his latest collection of poems, titled Left Over (Dye Hard Press).

I’ve just spent three months at Rhodes University as their Mellon Writer in Residence, which not only meant lots of time staring into the blue yonder, writing new pieces and fragments of pieces, but also plenty time to read and to amass new titles.

I finished Thomas Bernhard’s Gargoyles, a brutal and austere book about a rural doctor who takes his son with him on his daily rounds, but filled with extraordinary passages like: “The darkness is cold when the head is switched off.” Then Roberto Bolano’s Monsieur Pain. Bolano is one of my favourite writers, though I admit I have not yet pushed through his 2666. After Bolano there was Sleeper’s Wake by Cape Town writer Alistair Morgan. The first half of the book was excellent – the opening chapters winded me. His prose is clean, cold and beautiful. Then I read lots – and I do mean lots – of poetry, and discovered many new authors. The American Alice Notley, for one. Her new and selected poems, Grave of Light. Extraordinary! Read lots of Louise Gluck, and Marianne Borusch, Mina Loy and Jorie Graham.

Then a friend gave me Anne Carson’s An Oresteia, her translation of three Greek tragedies. I’ve only read her introduction to Agamemnon so far that begins thus: “It’s like watching a forest fire.”

(Published in Cape Times, July 12, 2013)

Keep your hands to yourself

Invite to the Joburg launch of Kobus Moolman's Left Over and Khulile Nxumalo's fhedzi

New title from Dye Hard Press: fhedzi by Khulile Nxumalo

fhedzi is Khulile Nxumalo's second poetry collection.
94 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9869982-1-8

Khulile Nxumalo was born in Diepkloof, Soweto, in 1971. He finished school at Waterford Kamhlaba, Swaziland, and went to the University of Cape Town, University of Natal and Wits University. His first poetry collection, ten flapping elbows, mama, was published by Deep South in 2004. His work has appeared in several literary journals in South Africa, Canada, the UK and the US. Nxumalo has twice won the DALRO award for poetry.  He has two children.

Khulile Nxumalo is one of the few poets in South Africa using longer experimental forms. He has found a creative way of breaking up the English language and fusing it with other languages. He is also capable of intense lyrical expression. – Robert Berold

magma-burn. emotion-lava spilling out. of wounds. 

and thoughts of them expressed in ghostly words

of the divining spirit. and coming thru the smog.

and dust,blood-rained on strange children's games.

and ever The Voice, lonesome, wearied, spiralling inward...

with this one, sikhulile! – Lesego Rampolokeng

fhedzi will soon be available at bookstores countrywide, at an estimated retail price of R145. If ordered directly from the publisher, the price is R120, including postage.  contact dyehardpress@iafrica.com to order.

My sorceress

Can we know the dancer from the dance? - a review of Gail Dendy's Closer Than That

This collection of poems comprises four numbered but unnamed sections, leaving it up to the reader to determine the significance of this formal structure. The first section might be thought of as dealing with perspectives onto various types of creativity, including the creation of earthly existence according to the mock-theology of the demiurge in the first poem, ‘The Apprentice’ (pp. 9–10). Other areas include writing (‘To Write or Not To Write’ [p. 11]), trapeze work (‘The High-Wire Artist’ [p. 12]), and ballet (‘Swan Lake’ [p.13]). To disturb my neat categorisation, the section also provides perspectives onto past school-acquaintances (‘Linda’ [p. 14]), love (‘Constancy’ [p. 15]), ‘Vertigo’ [pp. 19–20]), and, with a backward glance at Wallace Stevens, fruit (‘Ruminations on the Plum’ [pp. 16–17]). Part II might be read as concerning objects, poems, amethyst, skin, cats, the sun, computers and books (pp. 23–35). Part III deals with the self’s relation to activity and to others (pp. 39–54), whilst Part IV concerns itself with the self’s relation to a wider world (pp. 57–71).

Of course, the moment one tries to delimit the significance of a structure, the inadequacy of doing so becomes apparent, and the reader appreciates the poet’s use of numerals rather than titles − they give a pace to and, more importantly, a place for the reading. The numerals provide compartments in which to dwell for a time, until the resonances within the parts become clearer, and the structural logic of the arrangement justifies itself from within, rather than being imposed from without. As always, in this book too, one has to live with poetry, not just read it once or twice, in order to appreciate it. And Dendy warrants re-reading. Her style is lucid, her language and images accessible, even when meanings are not immediately apparent. My one complaint is that some poems, whilst they might contain intriguing ideas (I think of ‘The Apprentice’, which provides a comic cause for a bungled creation), have throwaway lines which, although in keeping with the necessary lightness of touch required in this particular poem, are simply not memorable. The demiurge in ‘The Apprentice’ ‘tried to say sorry’ for the ‘bloody disaster’ he or she or it caused (and here comes the final line, the supposed climax of the poem): ‘I did. I really, really did’ (p. 10).

The book is noteworthy for the lively intelligence that Dendy always shows, even in those poems that present themselves as ‘throwaway’ poems (in reality, no poem good enough for publication is ‘throwaway’; they all require intense effort in the writing). This is best exemplified through a few extracts. Here is one from the beginning of ‘Amethyst’, which reminds me of aspects of Neruda’s Sky Stones:

The potted violet is blooming again, 
its miniature florets feathering out 
like scattered amethysts on a sea-green floor. 
It opens like a breath underwater. 

The interplay between the tetrameter beat and the varying feet − amphibrachs, dactyls, trochees, and iambs − creates a delicate rhythm, which takes its cue from the polysyllabic cluster in the eponymous ‘amethysts’. The modulation amongst images is very fine, being at once descriptive, kinetic, and imaginatively transformative, where breath inhabits an element that should be foreign, but is in perfect accord with what went before.

Dendy is herself a dancer, and how well she inhabits the movement, the at-oneness of dancer and dance (to draw on Yeats), in the words of one of the poems in this book, ‘Circles’:

The fire encircles the dancers, 
and the dancers are like flames, 

and their feet are flames 
and their skirts are like the circles 

when rain beats on the water, 
and the water dances 

to the sound of the rain, 
and in silence  

the rain stops dancing 
in its silver circles, 

and so the dancers are gone, 
and you are a solitary, whirling flame. (p. 52) 

Her inhabiting of the dance is also, we realise by the end of the poem, an internalisation of the dance by the writer, to the point of identification with the flame (which originally was likened to the dancers): ‘and you are a solitary, whirling flame’. The second person pronoun here empties selfhood, underlining absorbed identification with the ‘whirling flame’. Interesting, as in ‘Amethyst’, is the presence of ‘water’. Coterminous with flame, it helps signal the transitivity amongst radically different elements, a figurative pliancy, which extends into the transformation of form into movement, and the inhabiting of sense almost void of consciousness (being the ‘flame’ in an after-effect kindled by the dance). For me, this is Dendy at her best, the poet whose formal elegance can celebrate an interpenetration of formal boundaries, whose vision thrives on the fluid effects of suggestion.

This volume will appeal to readers of contemporary poetry who value accessibility allied to intellectual acuity and emotional sensitivity. It is also a fine example of the flowering of poetry in South Africa over the past two decades, especially amongst female poets.

Nicholas Meihuizen
First published in Literator, North-West University, South Africa

From mimetic punctiliousness to imaginative free play: a review of The Edge of Things

In 1958 Randall Jarrell, the American poet, edited and brought out a collection of stories, Randall Jarrell’s Book of Stories, which contains a famous introduction. The book was long out of print
but has been recently republished as a New York Review Books Classic (2002). It is, naturally, very difficult to generalise about a book such as the one under review, but there is one section of
Jarrell’s introduction that seems pertinent to The Edge of Things, in its mixture of complexity and comprehensiveness:

It is so good, our stories believe, simply to remember: their elementary delight in recognition, familiarity, mimesis, is another aspect of their obsession with all the likenesses of the universe, those metaphors that Proust called essential to style. Stories want to know: everything from the first blaze and breathlessness and fragrance to the last law and structure, but, too, stories don’t want to know, don’t want to care, just want to do as they please. (Jarrell 2002: x)

The range of the story: from mimetic punctiliousness to imaginative free play. Arja Salafranca’s task, as compiler of The Edge of Things, is not to ponder the nature of short fiction; it is to present as many works as possible, with an eye on quality, in order to promote the genre in this country. She notes that the stories submitted for publication in the book showed ‘an astonishing variety of narratives and approaches, shifting from realism to playful absurdity and crossing the boundaries from the strictly fictional to something that sits just beyond fiction, but isn’t quite nonfiction either’ (p. 7). Jarrell would have approved.

Looking at the stories themselves one finds it hard to pick out those that deserve special mention, but let me refer to some. ‘Bounce’ (p. 9), by Jayne Bauling, is a curiously gripping account (perhaps because this reviewer has tried to do the same) of the attempted rescue of a baby lourie, psychologically bound to the loss of a murdered partner. Salafranca’s own ‘The Iron Lung’ (p.18), juxtaposes two first-person accounts, those of mother and daughter, about life with the iron lung device; the device assumes a figurative significance. Cunningly different from other stories is Liesl Jobson’s ‘You pay for the view: twenty tips for super pics’ (p. 30), a life story constructed around the said tips and moments captured as camera events. The events begin with
‘1. Hold it steady’, and end with ‘20. Watch the light’, and cover a period, not always in strictly chronological order, of 32 years. In this and other stories failed marriages are at issue. I think of Gillian Schutte’s ‘Doubt’ (p. 50), with its erotic daydreams, and Karina Magdalena Szczurek’s ‘The Basket’ (p. 62), where the death of a newly-retired husband in a motorbike accident actually brings the protagonist (and the reader) a sense of relief.

In the collection’s eponymous ‘The edge of things’ (p. 78), by Jenna Mervis, the protagonist is alone with her dog in a cottage on the edge of suburban space, that appears to be spied on by possible intruders. She is without, or is separated from, a partner, and the narrator uses this absence and her sense of vulnerability to create suspense. In the end, though, Samson the dog, in the middle of a moonlit night, leads her outdoors, away from her locks and alarms, into a magical dream dimension, ‘on the edge of things’ in a different sense from that originally suggested.

Pravasan Pillay’s ‘Mr Essop’ (p.137) is a matter-of-fact, Hemingwayesque account of an instance of coldly administered cruelty to a child, with some fine moments of dialogue in Chatsworth dialect. Again, it is obviously impossible to mention all the stories in the book, but let me conclude with a brief look at Dan Wylie’s ‘Solitude’ (p. 256). Here we find a punctiliously crafted story, indeed. The protagonist is an aloof, cynical academic, complacently single, with a distaste for the life around him. He works on a crossword puzzle, clue by clue. The puzzle proves intrinsic to the plot, as the life around him, with its grubbiness and despair, enters into his puzzle (though he remains imperturbable.

The book will appeal to lovers of fiction and narrative in whatever forms. Those who relish detail, those who desire free play, are catered for. Not all the stories are of the same quality, but each, in its way, is enjoyable, and is reflective of the old cliché that everyone carries a story, or stories, within him or her. There is something of this democracy of the narrative urge in these stories, which makes of them a useful and enlightening panorama of local experience, states of mind, and states of emotion.

Nicholas Meihuizen
First published in Literator, North-West University, South Africa

Forbidden steps

Kobus Moolman's Left Over on display at Exclusive Books, Hyde Park, Johannesburg

The Right Start

Illustrated book covers: Machineries of Joy by Ray Bradbury

Published by Corgi Books, London, 1969

Hope lights up dark visions: a review of Kobus Moolman's Left Over, by Kayla Roux

Kobus Moolman, a well-published poet, editor, teacher and playwright, launched his newest anthology of poems and musings at the Eastern Star Education Centre in Grahamstown last week. 

Taking a break from teaching creative writing at UKZN, he arrived in Grahamstown in April and will be staying until the middle of July, lending a talented hand with the Rhodes MA Creative Writing course. 

While I haven't yet had the pleasure of reading any of his previous poetry books, his newest is called Left Over (published by Dye Hard Press) and it had me spellbound...Read more here 

Forthcoming title from Dye Hard Press: fhedzi by Khulile Nxumalo

fhedzi is Khulile Nxumalo's second poetry collection.
90-pages
ISBN: 978-0-9869982-1-8

Khulile Nxumalo was born in Diepkloof, Soweto, in 1971. He finished school at Waterford Kamhlaba, Swaziland, and went to the University of Cape Town, University of Natal and Wits University. His first poetry collection, ten flapping elbows, mama, was published by Deep South in 2004. His work has appeared in several literary journals in South Africa, Canada, the UK and the US. Nxumalo has twice won the DALRO award for poetry.  He has two children.

Khulile Nxumalo is one of the few poets in South Africa using longer experimental forms. He has found a creative way of breaking up the English language and fusing it with other languages. He is also capable of intense lyrical expression. – Robert Berold

magma-burn. emotion-lava spilling out. of wounds. 

and thoughts of them expressed in ghostly words

of the divining spirit. and coming thru the smog.

and dust,blood-rained on strange children's games.

and ever The Voice, lonesome, wearied, spiralling inward...

with this one,sikhulile! – Lesego Rampolokeng

William S Burroughs: Our Spiritual Destiny is in Space, an interview with William Weiss

Published by Beat Scene Press, Coventry, England

Review of Alan Finlay's pushing from the riverbank, by Marike Beyers

The poems in pushing from the riverbank move in a space of being where all attempts to hold on to something resist us.“Everything fails, and then is born again.” Returning from holiday, the lawn is overgrown, the cat lost, the neighbour encroaches on the border, the three-year-old fights off the dangers of the world, the beloved suffers, the roles demanded of us seem larger than ourselves. “i say to my son: i love you      he breaks free”. There is desolation and amazement in that. There is no match between what life offers and what we need, the poet says - “our needs rest on the twigs of a river crossing”. Yet, he seems to tell us, we continue shaping, trying to interpret what surrounds us.

pushing from the riverbank is Alan Finlay’s fourth collection of poems and although it contains only about 20 poems, prose poems and a few illustrations, it is a large collection in what it asks about - boundaries of self, life, of what words can do. The first poem, wind& sea, starts with an epigraph by Gertrude Stein – “why after a thing is named write about it”. Appropriate, because these writings are a naming, a searching for what is beyond words, where being is in the spaces between.

The poet uses spaces in visibly startling ways, even creating a sense of looking for the possibility of the right and left sides of the poem reading as two interlinking streams in wind& sea and i watch you go. Indents and spaces give a sense of a physical shape to the poem, drawing attention to the textuality of the poem as experience. An example of this is the crescent form of the lyrical poem this evening where the lines and imagery mimic each other.

Writing as a twig across the river of chaos - the poet uses natural images of sun, wind, wood, rivers to describe the relations between people and world, the archetypal relationships between man, woman and child – and these become one, merge in the living, both desolately and intimately so:

"i fish in your gravity 
i  fish in your give”

he writes in wind& sea

“you recognize your longing 
in my falling face
                  at night i sing for you 
                  all night i walk alone for you”

Family is described as root form of being, yet the losing of self, the shifting boundaries of relationships are presented in the difficulty of naming and in images of pain.

                 “i wait by your unwound
wound 
your deflated body 
suture of your sex”

The metaphor of house as a relationship, as a place of fragile safety, as the life of a family, recurs in the collection. This place held in words - “there is a house    I have with words”, the poet says. This is a sense of being enveloped in a sense of loss and hurt:

 "i wait for you    who can turn 
       back to me 
i wait                for my last window”

In the context of gender relations the image of the house returns: “You have been punched out woman / and you are the ceiling to this house”. Yet also the speaker’s alienation:

"do you know my name? 
the one wound round with

copper silence”

where copper is used as symbol for currency, the demands of the world, the harshness of need. There is the complexity in poems presenting interplay between mother, father and child as archetypal figures. Two poems, the child goes out and the child wants his mother, give us little broken stories, the way we are together and apart:

“…this is how my mother is.’ She is 
 teaching

the alphabet. B is for 
Broken. ….

The son and the father go out into the 
dark, to be alone, in the dark together”

and

“The child wants his mother. The child 
wants his mother, and mother and mother. 
 Capitulating through the ages: stone, 
tree, wood, bark: laugh. 
her laugh, a second sound”

However, there are also poems that function as small family scenes: a mother packing away toys; tired parents after a birthday party; a father and child worrying about money, a prose poem of a child thinking about troubles in his family while hotfooting it to the music shop “just kid-quiet in his own world not have to say anything.” It is difficult not to be touched by the small scenes of interaction between father and son. For example:

“i’m telling my three-year-old child 
that the world is not so safe 
but he knows already: he’s fighting
dragons with his sword…”

Similarly, there is a homely intimacy in the longer title poem to the collection where the poet is overwhelmed by the demands of the world -

“inbox choking with e-mails 
everywhere the world tilting 
towards me the day so i
get up at night, four in the 
morning get it started 
so i can push back…”

and the child climbs into bed with him, wanting to talk, bringing his own fears about “sharks and monsters when / i flush the toilet – remember // those?”. This frightful world of monsters, dreams, economic pressure, tasks and our struggle to find peaceful boundaries all are present in these poems. Part of this frightful world is also the aggression within the self – presented as a growling tiger, sometimes placated to hide in stories and dreams, in writing, but “growling underneath”. It would be foolish, the poet suggests, to think that by reflecting the dangers of the world we negate those threats, even our own violence – “Soon he will turn back to the leaves and you will not hear from him until nightfall”. It is for nightfall that we need poetry this honest. “Life says: I do not hold you. Make of me what you will.” This the poet sees. What do we make of life, day by day – reaching, for words, for those around us, from the leaves, from our darkness. The poet reaches for the day with his frightened child to

“… respond to 
e-mails, it’s ok, i love

you, i say i say as if 
to repeat myself: and feel the 
pull as if i push back with my

legs, from the riverbank 
let go gently 
so you might understand

into the day.”

Marike Beyers
(Published in NELM News 54, December 2012)