Kaar

A large collection, roughly half of it given to nature, from garden plants to wild creatures and birds, half to the human animal, often watching species that are threatened or gone, from the quagga to the seahorse; a long sequence follows a hadeda day by day. One section mourns the poet's father, from whom her Afrikaans first came. Others move between New Zealand, Britain, America and the Netherlands, ending with New Year's Eve in Amsterdam, and ask whether home is still possible in a South Africa of corrupt officials and quarrelling poets. Later poems attack ills at home and abroad, from colonial history to the threat of fracking in the Karoo and oil in the Niger Delta. The language mixes Dutch loans, old and forgotten words, Kaaps and newly made ones.

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About the book

Form

Poetry

Length

216 pages in the original

First published

2013 by Human & Rousseau

Author's age

59 when first published

ISBN

9780798163057 (original)