Article
Editorial: 15 May 2010
May 10, 2010
On the South Africa domain, we have both Afrikaans and English work. Young prize-winning Afrikaans poet Loftus Marais is represented by five poems which, as Charl-Pierre Naudé writes, focus on “the throwaway moment, the unexpected illumination, the shy revelation – all of which shine through the muck and mutability and banality of everyday life with a charming persistence. And with reluctant love”. For the bathos of its second line, and its wry juxtaposition of suburbia with nature, ‘Still Life with Wild Life’, is one of my favourites.
English-language poet Kelwyn Sole’s prose poems from his collection Land Dreaming explore South African identity, fears and inter-racial (mis)communication. The most striking of his poems here is perhaps ‘Gardening Tips’, a poem both ironic and troubling, which takes the form of a TV gardening-show transcript.
Joan Metelerkamp also writes in English, though her work is very different to Sole’s – in fact, argues her publisher Colleen Higgs, her work has more in common with writers such as Michael Ondaatje and Anne Carson than with other South African poets. The selection of poems published here are taken from her book-length cycle of poems, Burnt Offering. Stylistically, Metelerkamp uses repetition and near-repetition combined with ellipsis to create sparse yet rhythmic, almost incantatory effects:
the primitive one-string cello,
bent low playing a threnody, thread, theme I know,
into the night as I wake heaving it, hearing it –
like a chorus dissolving
not only sadness, sea,
but past sadness
past past sadness
(from ‘Sea’)
On the Ireland domain, Patrick Cotter introduces five poets from a new anthology, Landing Places, which collects together immigrant poets working and living in Ireland, a country with a very recent history of mass immigration to its shores. In the past six years, Ireland has experienced incredible change in its social demographics. “Not only has the ethnic mix changed irrevocably”, Cotter notes, “but a culture traumatised by centuries of emigration has suddenly had to accommodate itself to the phenomenon of immigration”.
This issue of PIW Ireland aims to represent the new ethnic diversity of Ireland, featuring England-born poets Mark Roper and Adam Wyeth; Jennifer Matthews, who hails from the USA; Angolan-French Landa Wo; and Panchali Mukherji, who was born in Calcutta, India. Displacement and shifting cultural identities aren’t simply limited to the facts of these poets’ biographies. In the poems published here, we also see their work negotiating notions of home, travel, distance and exile – from Panchali Mukherji’s lyrical and mysterious ‘Odysseus Today’ to the dizzying virtual world odyssey in Adam Wyeth’s ‘Google Earth’, in which the internet both re-affirms and defamiliarises the spaces we move through and live in.
We’re one issue away from our June edition of PIW, which will be dedicated to the 41st Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam, taking place from 11–18 June. We’ll feature articles about the festival and this year’s festival theme, prose and its relationship to poetry, as well as poems by the twenty-four international guest poets. Before then, read about the poets and festival events via our beautiful new festival blog and on the www.poetry.nl festival site.
In the meantime, in this issue, domain editors Liesl Jobson (South Africa) and Patrick Cotter (Ireland) bring a varied line-up of poets to PIW.On the South Africa domain, we have both Afrikaans and English work. Young prize-winning Afrikaans poet Loftus Marais is represented by five poems which, as Charl-Pierre Naudé writes, focus on “the throwaway moment, the unexpected illumination, the shy revelation – all of which shine through the muck and mutability and banality of everyday life with a charming persistence. And with reluctant love”. For the bathos of its second line, and its wry juxtaposition of suburbia with nature, ‘Still Life with Wild Life’, is one of my favourites.
English-language poet Kelwyn Sole’s prose poems from his collection Land Dreaming explore South African identity, fears and inter-racial (mis)communication. The most striking of his poems here is perhaps ‘Gardening Tips’, a poem both ironic and troubling, which takes the form of a TV gardening-show transcript.
Joan Metelerkamp also writes in English, though her work is very different to Sole’s – in fact, argues her publisher Colleen Higgs, her work has more in common with writers such as Michael Ondaatje and Anne Carson than with other South African poets. The selection of poems published here are taken from her book-length cycle of poems, Burnt Offering. Stylistically, Metelerkamp uses repetition and near-repetition combined with ellipsis to create sparse yet rhythmic, almost incantatory effects:
the primitive one-string cello,
bent low playing a threnody, thread, theme I know,
into the night as I wake heaving it, hearing it –
like a chorus dissolving
not only sadness, sea,
but past sadness
past past sadness
(from ‘Sea’)
On the Ireland domain, Patrick Cotter introduces five poets from a new anthology, Landing Places, which collects together immigrant poets working and living in Ireland, a country with a very recent history of mass immigration to its shores. In the past six years, Ireland has experienced incredible change in its social demographics. “Not only has the ethnic mix changed irrevocably”, Cotter notes, “but a culture traumatised by centuries of emigration has suddenly had to accommodate itself to the phenomenon of immigration”.
This issue of PIW Ireland aims to represent the new ethnic diversity of Ireland, featuring England-born poets Mark Roper and Adam Wyeth; Jennifer Matthews, who hails from the USA; Angolan-French Landa Wo; and Panchali Mukherji, who was born in Calcutta, India. Displacement and shifting cultural identities aren’t simply limited to the facts of these poets’ biographies. In the poems published here, we also see their work negotiating notions of home, travel, distance and exile – from Panchali Mukherji’s lyrical and mysterious ‘Odysseus Today’ to the dizzying virtual world odyssey in Adam Wyeth’s ‘Google Earth’, in which the internet both re-affirms and defamiliarises the spaces we move through and live in.
© Sarah Ream
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