Synapse

These poems keep returning to conscience, to remembering and to language. The hyphenated title suggests knowing together: a shared awareness, often of a guilt Afrikaners hold in common, and of the other person always present. Many poems take the form of conversation, among them a sequence of servants’ talk that exposes how self and other misread each other. The opening poem buries her father in the bitter Free State cold; others turn to her parents, children, husband and grandchildren, to marriage, and to her own death. A love of forebears, of the farm and the land, is set against the privilege it carried, while women ancestors who owned land answer the patriarchs. Violence, loneliness and transience recur, and one poem marks the death of Nelson Mandela.

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About the book

Form

Poetry

Length

128 pages in the original

First published

2014 by Human & Rousseau

Author's age

62 when first published

ISBN

9780798167871 (original)

9780798167925 (Human & Rousseau, South Africa)