BOOK Southern Africa

Three from Incwadi Autumn 2010

by Sophy on 16 Mar 2010   |   

Gregor Rohrig – Pigeon Flight

Incwadi, an online journal of South African poetry and photography edited by Ingrid Andersen, has released its most recent issue – Autumn 2010.

Contributors to Incwadi Autumn 2010:

Ingrid Andersen, Laura Arbuckle, Gary Cummiskey, Richard de Nooy, Isobel Dixon, Finuala Dowling, Gus Ferguson, Sarah Frost, Megan Hall, Kerry Hammerton, Peter Horn, Samantha Kipling, Anton Krueger, Michelle McGrane, Mandy Mitchell, Helen Moffett, Kobus Moolman, Dashen Naicker, AR Reid, Gregor Rohrig, Arja Salafranca, Tania van Schalkwyk, Crystal Warren, Dan Wylie, Fiona Zerbst.

Three poems from Incwadi Autumn 2010

Mathematics

The short drop is never easy, Erik.
You need to give a lot of thought
to vectors, weights and coefficients
which never were my strongest suit.
But you, my friend, took full measure
of the terminal rationale
before you hit the lab and put
your grim equation to the test.
You scored full marks
All went as you predicted
Beam + rope + knot + body = X
But where does gravity fit in? And how?
And so you left us dangling
shrugging, cursing that
we cannot comprehend
such simple mathematics.

- Richard de Nooy

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Doppelganger

In the middle of it all
on a sprung floor
a fellow mingler laughed,
saying I was such a card
I really should meet my other half
and marvel.

Miraculously,
according to the stranger,
my twin was there that night:
in wit and waggish turn of verb
a perfect match. It was uncanny
to find two so alike
at the same party.

We must be introduced –
the wind must whip the flame!
the wave must strike the shore!

“There — at the other end of the room –
can you see which man I mean?”

I didn’t need to look.
I knew it would be you, my own,
and that later, when all our charm was blown
we’d fight in the car on the way home.

- Finuala Dowling

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A Thing of Beauty

Cicadas sandpaper-shaping shadows,
sawing away the dry hot holidays,
welding that day and dozens like it
into one deep, burning sky. This,
before words, is our blue and gold childhood
melded in memory’s magnificent workshop,
enameled in a never-ending half-existent noon.

- Isobel Dixon

• Read the complete issue of Incwadi Autumn 2010

Poetry Reading: Helen Moffett and Liesl Jobson at Folio Books

by Liesl on 16 Mar 2010   |   

Folio Books’ poetry series launched with a bang last month and continues with wicked women’s words from BOOK SA regulars, Helen Moffett and Liesl Jobson. You’re invited to come and share a glass of wine while listening to poems that will delight, shock, comfort and amuse.

Helen Moffett is a freelance writer, editor, academic and poet, who’s lectured as far afield as Trinidad and Alaska. Her academic writings include a great deal of gloomy but necessary work on sexual violence in the post-apartheid context. She writes about cricket because it reminds her why she likes men (and because she loves the game with a passion). She has also published a university textbook on poetry, an anthology of South African landscape writing and several short stories. Her debut collection of poems, Strange Fruit</a , was recently published by Modjaji Books.

Liesl Jobson is a musician, photographer and writer, and the author of 100 Papers, a collection of prose poems and flash fiction (Botsotso, 2008) and an anthology of poetry, View from an Escalator (Botsotso, 2008). She is the winner of the POWA women’s writing poetry competition and the Ernst van Heerden Creative Writing Award.

Event Details

• Date: Friday, 19 March 2010
• Time: 6:00 PM for 6:30 PM
• Venue: Folio Books, | Map
• Refreshments: Refreshments will be served
• RSVP: Folio Books, FolioBooks@storm.co.za, 021 685 7190

Book Details

• Strange Fruit by Helen Moffett
  Book Homepage
  EAN: 9780980272963
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Strange Fruit

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Book details

• View from an Escalator by Liesl Jobson
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  EAN: 9780981406831
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Phillippa Yaa de Villiers' new book, The Everyday Wife is a treat

by Colleen on 16 Mar 2010   |   

A book I am thrilled to be bringing out in April is The Everyday Wife by Phillippa Yaa de Villiers. I met her while working at the Centre for the Book. We both participated in the British Council sponsored Crossing Borders programme in 2005/6. At the final workshop we got to read our writing, and Phillippa read a sonnet about her son that brought me to tears. Since that first meeting, we worked together on her first collection, Taller than Buildings, for which she received a Community Publishing grant, have seen each other at various Cape Town book fairs and here on Book SA, and now we have this new relationship. It’s an honour to publish her new collection. Phillippa has an extraordinary energy and facility with words and images.

Actually bringing the book out is a midwifing process, and we are (as I speak) still attempting to make the book a bit shorter (budget constraints) except that the poems Phillippa is willing to “kill” (her words) are the ones I love. But we have the cover, we have the wonderful Megadigital waiting in the wings to print, we have the London Book Fair, we have Book SA, we have all Phillippa’s fans. We have the first draft of the layout done by Jacqui Stecher who also did the cover design. We are in poetry book labour ward. Now we want to hold the baby in our arms.

Phillippa was lucky enough to have Margaret Busby write a foreword, for The Everyday Wife, so to tantalise you, here it is…

What treats are served up in this new book of poems by Phillippa Yaa de Villiers!

To read just the first line of the first poem is to be skeined into a tantalizing world where nothing is predictable. Like the best of poets, she makes language do her bidding, wresting new sense from familiar images and situations, surprising us and ambushing our expectation. In the title poem can be seen the range and subtlety that characterises her work – the clear-eyed honesty, the perceptiveness, the playfulness, the attention to nuance. The Everyday Wife sums up the boundaries and expanses of a relationship,
the possibility of menace, even, in the midst of love.

In one way or another, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers illuminates relationships of many kinds and many intensities – between lovers, children and parents, the politics of emotion shared and remembered and confronted, sustained across the distance of place or memory. Sometimes, as in ‘The Organ of Love’ – which manages that crucial combination of passion and humour – she makes meaning hold on
to the last word of the poem like the last drop of a delicious drink.

In poem after poem are revealed different facets of her shapeshifting talent. The raw and numbing truths told in ‘Hell in a Handbag’ contrast starkly with the theatricality of a supermarket encounter in ‘The Middle Promise’, which transforms into a reminder that ‘the cost of things is not the same as the value of things’.

The historical and everyday realities of South Africa permeate even her observations about the weather as in ‘Home drenched’ and in ‘Sixty-nine bullets’ (for the Sharpeville 69) the tragedy is given poignant new impact.

Her blending of the literal and the metaphysical makes it possible to take so much from a single image:
one girl
sits tidily beside a giant cactus, the giant sun
just another father: distant and a little too warm.

The alarming familiar that she summons up so matter-of-factly, and so well, in ‘The guest’ epitomizes that edginess of imagination, and the sanity of the conclusion that one can never improve on freedom.

Phillippa Yaa de Villiers has claimed a freedom to speak the unspoken, however it emerges. ‘A safe house is a place of fear’ – a title thought-provoking in itself – captures the potency of silence, the dangerous power of wordlessless, where ‘silence is the skin of fear’.‘Words become me,’ she begins by saying, in ‘Lasso’… ‘withoutthem I am shorn’. Phillippa Yaa de Villiers is a poet for
whom there is no danger of separation from expression. She definitely has a way with words, and words have their way with her.

Pre-London Book Fair Special Offer on Modjaji Books new titles

by Colleen on 16 Mar 2010   |   

Modjaji Books has several new titles coming out in April and May. If you would like to pre-order any of these titles at a special discount price, here’s your chance. It’s also a way of supporting an indie publisher.

The titles are:

Arja Salafranca’s collection of short stories The Thin Line.
Recommended Retail Price in stores – R145.
Modjaji Pre-Order price including postage where relevant: R125

Meg Vandemerwe’s collection of short stories This Place Called Home
Recommended Retail Price in stores – R145.
Modjaji Pre-Order price including postage where relevant: R125

Jane Katjavivi’s memoir, Undisciplined Heart
Recommended Retail Price in stores – R170
Modjaji Pre-Order price including postage where relevant: R150

Small Publisher’s Catalogue 2010 (Africa)
Recommended Retail Price in stores – R150
Modjaji Pre-Order price including postage where relevant: R100

Phillippa Yaa de Villiers new collection of poems, The Everyday Wife
Recommended Retail Price in stores – R130
Modjaji Pre-Order price including postage where relevant: R110

Modjaji’s Book of Bed Short Stories
Recommended Retail Price in stores – R150
Modjaji Pre-Order price including postage where relevant: R130

Special Offer if you order all 6 of the titles you pay R690 (an extra R50 off, the already reduced price)

Check out all Modjaji Books titles here ….

Go on, you know you want them and you will be supporting independent publishing in a big way!

For more information about any of the titles click on the links above.

A New Poetry Collection from Leon de Kock: Bodyhood

by Amanda on 12 Mar 2010   |   

The poems in Bodyhood open widely to the inside while looking outwards at the connecting points of body and being – in love, in feeling, in the entanglements of desire, and in the many felt senses of human cross-connection. At once reflective, wistful, wry and ironic, they chart the individual’s imprint on a world accessible only through the bonds and affiliations of an embodied life.

About the author

Leon de Kock grew up in Mayfair, Johannesburg. He is head of the School of Literature and Language Studies at Wits and holds degrees from the Universities of Johannesburg, Leeds and South Africa. He is a writer, translator and academic, and has worked as reporter, sub-editor and in the private sector.

He has received the Pringle Prize for Poetry (1985), the FNB Vita/English Academy Prize for Poetry Translation (2000) and the SA Translators’ Award for Outstanding Translation (2000) for his translation of Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf.

Book details

• Bodyhood by Leon de Kock
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781415200995
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New Editions of Antjie Krog's Trilogy

by Amanda on 11 Mar 2010   |   

Antjie Krog’s Begging to be Black was released in July last year, completing the trilogy that began with Country of My Skull and followed with A Change of Tongue. To celebrate, RHS is bringing out new editions of the first two books in the trilogy modelled on the same style as Begging to be Black. Now it’s simply a case of collect all three!

Book details

• Country of My Skull by Antjie Krog
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781770220744
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• A Change of Tongue by Antjie Krog
  EAN: 9781770220751
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• Begging to be Black by Antjie Krog
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781770220706
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Murray24 gesels met digter Lina Spies oor Die skyn van tuiskoms, pienk en die hiernamaals

by Chris on 10 Mar 2010   |   

Lina Spies se nuutste digbundel, Die skyn van tuiskoms is onlags deur Human en Rousseau bekend gestel en Murray24 het namens Die Burger by Spies gaan aanklop. Oor ‘n koppie tee gesels die twee toe lekker oor die bundel, die ouderdom, kinders en wat nog.

OP ’n reghoekige wit oppervlak teen die deur van ’n huis in die Stellenbosse buurt Die Boord verskyn die naam L. Spies in swart. En daarnaas ’n tekening van ’n kat waarvan die stert in die lug staan.

Die digter maak die deur oop. Wanneer sy sien die besoeker moet effens buk vir ’n bougainvillea-tak, versoek sy een van die mans wat besig is om veiligheidsheinings op te rig, om dit weg te snoei.

Die besoeker staan voor ’n boekrak. Deur ’n luik tussen die kombuis, waar sy besig is om tee te maak, en die leefvertrek sê Spies: “Dit verteenwoordig ’n paar van my groot liefdes: Die visuele kunste, plekke en katte.”

• Lees die volledige artikel in Die Burger

Boekbesonderhede

• Die skyn van tuiskoms: ‘n Keur uit die gedigte van Lina Spies saamgestel deur Johann de Lange
  Boektuisblad
  EAN: 9780798151443
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Zandra Bezuidenhout resenseer Bloot mens deur Jelleke Wierenga

by Carolyn on 09 Mar 2010   |   

Uitspraak: wortel

Jelleke Wierenga is ‘n wonderlike nuwe aankomeling op die Afrikaanse poësietoneel, met die “vernyn van ‘n steekvlieg”.

Só skryf Zandra Bezuidenhout in ‘n resensie van Wierenga se debuutbundel Bloot Mens op Die Burger se Boekeblok. Wierenga skep ‘n “herkenbare wêreld in algemene spreektaal” in haar poësie. “Die brandpunte is vir almal ter sake.”

Wierenga noem ‘n ding op sy naam en sy probeer nie paai nie. Die manier waarop sy sake verwoord is miskien ‘n bietjie te skerp en direk, maar tog is haar aanslag verfrissend.

en nog styf van bal en boud gegim / handel die geldbedeelde jongoumanne / koel forex-transaksies per bluetooth af / saam met opgeskerpte iPhone-vroutjies (“Lyflike”)

Liefhebbers van sagte vlinderpoësie mag Jelleke Wierenga se debuut nogal geniepsig vind, want sy dig met die venyn van ‘n steekvlieg. Tog, wanneer die spreker haar angeltjie terugvou, staan sy weerloos en naak; sy is “bloot mens” en “kaal” soos in die gedig “Kantwerk” – hoewel die uitdagende gezoem nie noodwendig bedaar nie. Danksy hierdie spel met teendele besit die bundel ‘n eiesoortige trefkrag.

• Volledige resensie in Die Burger

• Bloot mens tuisblad

Boekbesonderhede

• Bloot mens deur Jelleke Wierenga
  EAN: 9781869193119
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Help Granta Select the Best African Short Stories of the Past 50 Years?

by Ben - Editor on 09 Mar 2010   |   

Alert! BOOK SA is not entirely convinced of the genuineness of the call, but Granta magazine is apparently looking for help compiling the top African short stories of the past 50 years. The following notice has been found poking out of various online literary thickets:

The Granta Book of The African Short Story

Edited by Helon Habila and Binyavanga Wainaina

This anthology will bring together the best of the best African short stories published in the last 50 years. You are invited to recommend any great short story you have read in a collection, a magazine, online, or heard on the radio, but it has to be by an African author.

The story could be in English, French, Portuguese, Arabic, or any major African language, but the final language of publication will be English. Send story title, author’s name, and any publication information you have to help us track your recommended story. Send before April 30, 2010, to: africastories2010@gmail.com

Is it real? BOOK SA will be calling Granta later on to find out. Even if not, however, the exercise of considering Africa’s top shorts might be worthwhile. From South Africa, off the top of my head, I’d recommend Siphiwo Mahala’s “The Suit Continued” and Ivan Vladislavic’s “The WHITES ONLY Bench” as strong contenders.

Your choices? Comments welcome below, as always.

Book details

• Granta 109: Work edited by Alex Clark
  EAN: 9781905881130
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• Granta 91: The View from Africa edited by Ian Jack
  EAN: 9781929001224
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Breytenbach se 70ste lewensjaar gevier met Verse in my vingers (Foto's en Video)

by Carolyn on 08 Mar 2010   |   

“Dames en Here, vergun my om u voor te stel aan Breyten Breyntenbach, die maer man met die groen trui”.

Die teaterstuk Verse in my vingers, begin met hierdie bekende woorde uit Breytenbach se gedig “Bedreiging van die siekes”. In dié produksie, wat tydens die Woordfees opgevoer is, is voorlesings uit Breytenbach se werke en toonsettings van sy gedigte gebruik om hierdie groot digter se lewensverhaal te vertel.

Breytenbach word vanjaar 70. Ander groot skrywers wat vanjaar die mylpaal van 70 of 75 jaar haal, is by die Woordfees gehuldig. Breytenbach was ongelukkig nie by die fees aanwesig nie, maar Verse in my vingers het wel in sy afwesigheid sy 70 lewensjare gevier.

Musiek is deur Laurinda Hofmeyr verskaf en Johann Nel, Waldemar Schultz, Eugenie Wiggens en Hugo Theart het gedigte en ander skryfwerk van Breytenbach voorgelees. Gedigte, prosa en musiek het in die produksie soomloos in mekaar gevloei.

Daar is begin met gedigte en prosa oor Breytenbach se herkoms en familie. Hofmeyr het ‘n toonsetting van “Ek sal sterf en na my vader gaan” gesing. Daarna is Breytenbach se liefdesgedigte voorgedra en “Ek wag in my hart” is onder andere gesing.

Breytenbach se ontnugtering toe sy vrou gedurende apartheid toegang tot die land geweier is, is in sy eie woorde oorgedra. Die gehoor is bewusgemaak van Breytenbach se ambivalente gevoelens van liefde én haat teenoor Suid-Afrika.

Breytenbach se gedigte uit sy periode in die tronk is met gevoel voorgedra en so ook sy gedigte oor die dood.

Die applous aan die einde van die produksie was nie net vir die akteurs se gevoelvolle voordrag nie, maar ook vir dié meesterdigter: die maer man met die groen trui.

Facebook galery

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Video: Laurinda Hofmeyr voer Breyten Breytenbach se “Ek sal sterf en na my vader gaan” op

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Boekbesonderhede

• Oorblyfsel/Voice over deur Breyten Breytenbach
  EAN: 9780798150712
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• Die windvanger deur Breyten Breytenbach
  EAN: 9780798147507
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