Praise for Oleander by Fiona Zerbst

October 15th, 2009 by Colleen

In preparing a Modjaji Books catalogue, I was aware that I didn’t have any comments on Fiona Zerbst’s new book, Oleander, apart from the shout at the back of the book by Rustum Kozain. I asked Fiona if any of her literary friends had read it and if so to send me any comments. Well it took her a while to get this done, but it was worth the wait. I think Fiona is someone for whom self promotion is not an easy job. (But speaking as a publisher, it is important for writers to be able to do this to some extent, otherwise your books will lie unread in the distributor’s warehouse. And we all know where that leads…)

Here are comments on Fiona’s book by Peter Wilhelm, Karen Jayes and Gabeba Baderoon.

From Peter Wilhelm:

In Oleander, Fiona Zerbst’s lyrical voice reveals itself – not for the first time, she has been long been evident as an interpreter of her private and public worlds — but yet again strongly, freshly. Her continual reinvention of the self – and self-consciousness about the frame and objects of the invention – is perhaps more fully present than in any other young contemporary poet in South Africa. This is because the poems – offered as the fruit of expanding experience — suggest (along with a canny and precise observation of the natural world) an inner voyage not simply of discovery, but of a need to place this process – one of passing through as well as lingering to suggest and explore – in a personal, social, and spiritual adventure. This has its stopping-points (literally as well as metaphorically) in the world beyond ourselves as well as within our own perspective on our faith and hope and our embedding in the evolution of all the qualities of decency, passion, charity, and lucidity.
Above all, Ms. Zerbst is unafraid to allow her gifts both full and yet discreet expression. The visible is intensified; and this is present in poems on her travels in South-East Asia, her tracing of the workings of love in our racked world, and, abundantly, the green places as well the Cambodias of the soul. There is no flinching in such an expressive – and yet gentle – invitation into her lovely mind. One notes an affinity – beautifully stated – with several divergent life-artists from Frida Kahlo and Thom Gunn to men and women who root their being in experience and live as fully as the cage of life allows.
The intensity of her focus is truly realised: as in “Death of a Dog” with its compassion, illumination, and unfleering observation. So again in the notably titled “In Praise of Loss” with its yearning for transcendence. This collection shows a person reaching for her full human potential, and
choosing her right path.

Gabeba Baderoon says this:

The exquisite language of Oleander is integral to the ethos of the collection – in an ungiving world, the poems find an honest, austere beauty in the stories of those whom history erases. Here, the patient ghosts in abandoned places speak. ”This was a school/before it was wire and silence,” we learn in “Remembering S-21 Cambodia”.
In these generous and attentive poems, we hear the quiet engine that moves the whole world: “Gravity makes its noise,/a factory hum’. The poet takes evident delight in the eccentric, welling sounds of nature in “Shredding,” where birds “scritch in mulch/and leaves.’
And there is always beauty in the fragile body, as our gaze works along ‘the beadwork nubs of spine’.

Karen Jayes’ take on Oleander:

Each poem holds in it gigantic themes of loss and attachment (to place in particular) and what it is to create, and the beauty when seasons and landscapes collide, and ever turning time, and movement, always movement, in its careful, very female hands.
Fiona embraces the personal as well the global political, and grapples with the question of separating them, failing that she acknowledges that they are, at least for her, locked in a dance that is unending, unable to be separated, perhaps without a need ever to be.
The rhythm of each poem can be sighing, plucking and attentive, resigned, breaking, dancing, breathing, then reaching at the very end, that last gasp, which invites us to step higher, or dive lower, or leap off the little cliff, or simply take a single magical step across the room… and for this reason is worth reading to the very end.
By exhorting rain-wet, star-skied natural landscapes, she draws us into mysterious clearings, beaches, lakes, constellations inside ourselves… and says that in nature’s desolation and ruthless growth and mysterious pauses, there are moments of great catastrophe and realistion, of creation and of comfort.
Some highlights for me:
butterflies, shepardess, oleander
Here I found a very deep sense of place, and form, and in these forms – of the beating wings, the stubborn flowers, the icy statue, Fiona conjured up something of the immortal soul of these things, and maintained that personal distance required for a strong, omniscent voice, and through this, that essential thing of fine poetry: the guided epiphany.
leaving the summer house
Here I felt unending time, the vacuum of leaving into which step animals haunting, nature’s mysterious coverings, the bend of a creatures paw, hushed shadows. I remembered as a child turning around in the back seat of a car to catch a glimpse of a shadow I thought I’d seen behind me then wondering if it was a creature in my mind, and understanding that it could be, and that was wonderful… Into this pause, this after, imagination seeps and grows. For me, this was a lovely meditation on creativity, on imprinting what we imagine on what we don’t, and cannot ever possibly, know.
patterns
I really loved the way this poem opened with a leap; then it picked out the sounds of the seamstress and the factory, the disembodiment of people that the ’system’ requires, and then, within these workplace sounds and rhythms, it hunted for, hunkered after that precious thing, that restless, humane and lofty goal of finding beauty in its patterns. A true writer’s poem, but also a very feminine take on the ‘factory’ that is the unpeaceful world.

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