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The Only Magic We Know is a celebration of all the poets Modjaji has published. This anthology offers a taste of the range and diversity of the poems that have appeared in the individual poets collections.
A welcome step towards the reconstitution of South African past.'
The Short Story after Apartheid offers the first major study of the anglophone short story in South Africa since apartheid’s end. By focusing on the short story this book complicates models of South African literature dominated by the novel and contributes to a much-needed generic and formalist turn in postcolonial studies. Literary texts are sites of productive struggle between formal and extra-formal concerns, and these brief, fragmentary, elliptical, formally innovative stories offer perspectives that reframe or revise important concerns of post-apartheid literature: the aesthetics of engaged writing, the politics of the past, class and race, the legacies of violence, and the struggle over the land. Through an analysis of key texts from the period by Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavić, Zoë Wicomb, Phaswane Mpe, and Henrietta Rose-Innes, this book assesses the place of the short story in post-apartheid writing and develops a fuller model of how artworks allow and disallow forms of social thought.
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As we have come to expect with Joan Metelerkamp's work, these poems can be read individually or, more rewardingly, as a body, from cover to cover. Formal but fluent, the 'sonnets' ('soundings') of this sequence marry cycle and narrative, old and new, secular and sacred, momentary and eternal. This is a strange and immediately familiar book -: at its simplest it traces the story of a mother's 'letting-go' her grown children, a daughter's relocation to the Northern hemisphere, a wedding, shadows of deaths and losses, sparks of joy. It recalls the story of Demeter and Persephone, but goes on from there in immediately accessible South African, contemporary terms. Above all, it celebrates!
These are poems of unfolding. A brain in limbo; a mother's warnings, unheeded; the diving and swimming in life; fiances who evolve into husbands; a child not yet conceived; poems birthed so that the reader follows the evolution of a word into something tangible, erect, living. The poems in Woman Unfolding recognise the significance of poetry - its existence in the ordinary, as well as in the remarkable yet quiet evolutions we undergo through existing.
Poetry lovers - those who enjoy reading it and those who are compelled to write it - will find in this collection a truly splendid experience of the country's soul. So much of the ineffable human spirit and experience that usually remains untold is gently lifted above the surface with care, attention and honesty.
In this, her second individual collection, Haidee Kruger extends the accomplishment of her earlier work. With inventive use of line and page and an unusual, but telling, juxtaposition of images, she achieves a poetry that is simultaneously visceral and intellectual. Her poems are at once both toughly gnarled and delicately gentle. They immerse the reader in a world where the body is interpenetrated by the natural, sexual and workaday, and the previously familiar emerges strange and new.
Growing up in Cape Town as the only child of orthodox Jews who escaped the Holocaust, Jen rebels against the religious beliefs and superstitions her parents impose on her. Her aim in life is simply to have fun. But she quickly finds she can escape neither her heritage nor the consequences of her choices. Jen's life is overshadowed by the dybbuk - the malign force that she believes robs her of what she holds most dear. Her twin daughters, feisty and individual, are every bit as rebellious as she was. Burdened with the shifting sands of their home, the sisters are propelled inexorably towards the breakdown of all they have shared and deeply loved. Beautifully crafted and unpredictable, this captivating novel leaves long echoes, drawing readers into the undergrowth of family, the ambiguities of parental love and the ageless power of superstition, which binds even those who scorn it.