Bidsnoer

Eight sections, rounded off by a glossary of country words, make up this string of poems. It opens with love poems in which a woman’s body becomes landscape, playful, erotic and full of first initiations, set to the knocking of a toktokkie beetle. Then come verses of farmyard and district, some little more than lists whose heaped-up words make a pointed case for the land; a long poem that sketches a small town’s characters and scandals of long ago; poems on food and drink, getting by and dying; on the grape harvest; and on people of earlier times and their labour, from poor whites building dams to roasting coffee and making shoes by hand. The final section turns to the city and the people on the margins of wealthy suburbs: street children, a squatter camp under a full moon, sleepers in a wrecked bus.

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About the book

Form

Poetry

Length

96 pages in the original

First published

2018 by Naledi

Author's age

78 when first published

ISBN

9781928426066 (original)