A book I am thrilled to be bringing out in April is The Everyday Wife by Phillippa Yaa de Villiers. I met her while working at the Centre for the Book. We both participated in the British Council sponsored Crossing Borders programme in 2005/6. At the final workshop we got to read our writing, and Phillippa read a sonnet about her son that brought me to tears. Since that first meeting, we worked together on her first collection, Taller than Buildings, for which she received a Community Publishing grant, have seen each other at various Cape Town book fairs and here on Book SA, and now we have this new relationship. It’s an honour to publish her new collection. Phillippa has an extraordinary energy and facility with words and images.
Actually bringing the book out is a midwifing process, and we are (as I speak) still attempting to make the book a bit shorter (budget constraints) except that the poems Phillippa is willing to “kill” (her words) are the ones I love. But we have the cover, we have the wonderful Megadigital waiting in the wings to print, we have the London Book Fair, we have Book SA, we have all Phillippa’s fans. We have the first draft of the layout done by Jacqui Stecher who also did the cover design. We are in poetry book labour ward. Now we want to hold the baby in our arms.
Phillippa was lucky enough to have Margaret Busby write a foreword, for The Everyday Wife, so to tantalise you, here it is…
What treats are served up in this new book of poems by Phillippa Yaa de Villiers!
To read just the first line of the first poem is to be skeined into a tantalizing world where nothing is predictable. Like the best of poets, she makes language do her bidding, wresting new sense from familiar images and situations, surprising us and ambushing our expectation. In the title poem can be seen the range and subtlety that characterises her work – the clear-eyed honesty, the perceptiveness, the playfulness, the attention to nuance. The Everyday Wife sums up the boundaries and expanses of a relationship, the possibility of menace, even, in the midst of love.
In one way or another, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers illuminates relationships of many kinds and many intensities – between lovers, children and parents, the politics of emotion shared and remembered and confronted, sustained across the distance of place or memory. Sometimes, as in ‘The Organ of Love’ – which manages that crucial combination of passion and humour – she makes meaning hold on to the last word of the poem like the last drop of a delicious drink.
In poem after poem are revealed different facets of her shapeshifting talent. The raw and numbing truths told in ‘Hell in a Handbag’ contrast starkly with the theatricality of a supermarket encounter in ‘The Middle Promise’, which transforms into a reminder that ‘the cost of things is not the same as the value of things’.
The historical and everyday realities of South Africa permeate even her observations about the weather as in ‘Home drenched’ and in ‘Sixty-nine bullets’ (for the Sharpeville 69) the tragedy is given poignant new impact.
Her blending of the literal and the metaphysical makes it possible to take so much from a single image: one girl sits tidily beside a giant cactus, the giant sun just another father: distant and a little too warm.
The alarming familiar that she summons up so matter-of-factly, and so well, in ‘The guest’ epitomizes that edginess of imagination, and the sanity of the conclusion that one can never improve on freedom.
Phillippa Yaa de Villiers has claimed a freedom to speak the unspoken, however it emerges. ‘A safe house is a place of fear’ – a title thought-provoking in itself – captures the potency of silence, the dangerous power of wordlessless, where ‘silence is the skin of fear’.‘Words become me,’ she begins by saying, in ‘Lasso’… ‘withoutthem I am shorn’. Phillippa Yaa de Villiers is a poet for whom there is no danger of separation from expression. She definitely has a way with words, and words have their way with her.
Modjaji Books has several new titles coming out in April and May. If you would like to pre-order any of these titles at a special discount price, here’s your chance. It’s also a way of supporting an indie publisher.
The titles are:
Arja Salafranca’s collection of short stories The Thin Line. Recommended Retail Price in stores – R145. Modjaji Pre-Order price including postage where relevant: R125
Meg Vandemerwe’s collection of short stories This Place Called Home Recommended Retail Price in stores – R145. Modjaji Pre-Order price including postage where relevant: R125
Jane Katjavivi’s memoir, Undisciplined Heart Recommended Retail Price in stores – R170 Modjaji Pre-Order price including postage where relevant: R150
Phillippa Yaa de Villiers new collection of poems, The Everyday Wife Recommended Retail Price in stores – R130 Modjaji Pre-Order price including postage where relevant: R110
Modjaji’s Book of Bed Short Stories Recommended Retail Price in stores – R150 Modjaji Pre-Order price including postage where relevant: R130
Special Offer if you order all 6 of the titles you pay R690 (an extra R50 off, the already reduced price)
Check out all Modjaji Books titles here ….
Go on, you know you want them and you will be supporting independent publishing in a big way!
For more information about any of the titles click on the links above.
Arja Salafranca’s collection of stories, The Thin Line is due out in April, 2010, just in time for the London Book Fair. Arja’s has received many accolades and prizes for her poetry and short fiction since the mid 90’s. She is currently the editor of the Sunday Independent’s Lifestyle section.
This is what Hamilton Wende has to say about the collection:
These are wonderful stories. They chart a new direction in South African fiction, where each line, each page – each story unfolds subtly, reaching deeper and more intimately into the tender spaces that exist in all our lives between love and doubt. Reading them kept me up late at night, wanting to know more about the characters’ lives. I was enthralled by the clarity and compassion of her insights; and moved by her obvious love for our fragile country and the fierce power of our unrelinquished hopes.
Here is the blurb:
‘Words grow up and reverberate … they come back’
The short stories in The Thin Line show what happens when a writer casts a thin line into a pool of character and situation. Characters assume position, while readers see the lines they have drawn around the selves in the stories. As readers we are lucky – we can then step over these lines and watch from inside the story. We see characters draw battle lines and retreat behind them, mark out their territory with boundary lines and dare others to cross them. We notice as story lines escape from one story to resurface in others, sometimes the merest thread, sometimes a bolder and more definite intrusion. And sometimes we watch story lines loop back on themselves to form circles, or sharply curved ellipses. Some stories are cross-hatched with many lines – webbed and netted – and we watch the people inside these struggle to escape from situations, often of their own making – and often because they didn’t draw the line when they should have. Lines create boxes and keep people lonely and separate from each other. And sometimes, lines fade, are erased, or can be crossed, with happy and satisfying effect.
Whatever may happen inside these stories the reader is hooked from the first one, reeled in on that thin line. And they don’t leave you alone. You get up to make some toast, or check the mail and as you’re walking back to your desk, you’re thinking about the woman artist, or Corinna trapped in her huge teenage body, or Cleo in love with a married man after all these years, or poor skinny Mark, seeing his love teeter away from him.
“Only my love of the straight line keeps me going,” Carmen Herrera (Artist)
I’m really pleased to see reviews of the poetry collections, as there aren’t many publications that carry reviews of Poetry. So thanks for that Litnet. I look forward to seeing reviews of Oleander and Burnt Offering in due course.
Talking of which Joan Metelerkamp read from Burnt Offering at Wordsworths in Knysna last evening. Joan let me know today that the event was well attended, and Gillian Carter introduced Joan. I will see if I can get a copy of her talk and post it. I’m longing to hear Joan read from Burnt Offering. She did read at the Cape Town Book Fair last year, but only one poem.
Yesterday, I got an email from Jane Henshall at the British Council, letting me know that Malika Ndlovu, author ofInvisble Earthquake has been chosen by the SA Focus Steering Committee to participate in the London Book Fair next year. This follows closely on the heels of hearing that Modjaji Books received one of the 10 places for smaller, independent publishers. All of this is enormously thrilling, and underlies my sense that it was right to start Modjaji Books; there is a place for a small press focusing on the writing of Southern African women.
Robert Berold (who edited the collection) will introduce Joan Metelerkamp and Burnt Offering. Wine and snacks will be served
RSVP: Crystal Warren at C.Warren@ru.ac.za or tel: 046 622 7042
About the book Burnt Offering is Joan Metelerkamp’s seventh collection of poems. The title comes from a poem in a cycle that embodies the labours of the medieval alchemists – heating and burning, transformation of passionate intensity, the search for an enduring element. In the process malignant doubt is burnt off, and what takes its place is trust in the everyday:
take this day, here, take it all its clarity, all its gold –
Like all of Metelerkamp’s work, these generous poems draw on and weave together, with this poet’s distinctive energy and passion, the details of family and rural life, dreams, landscapes and journeys:
the chainsaw in the valley;
the chainsong of canaries, cisticolas, sombre bulbul, sunbirds, despite the cloud cover;
the script of named fynbos; the clear horizon, the still sea;
the discomfort of day’s plans, narratives, narratives.
About the author Joan Metelerkamp is the author of seven books of poems: Towing the Line (1992), Stone No More (1995), Into the day breaking (2000), Floating Islands (2001), Requiem (2003), Carrying the Fire (2005), and Burnt Offering (2009). She lives with her family in the Southern Cape.
Janet van Heerden interviewed Modjaji author, Fiona Zerbst about her new collection of poems, Oleander. The interview was published on Litnet recently. Read more here
Mediocre poems are just not good enough.
Fiona Zerbst’s fourth collection of poetry, Oleander, shows a poet at the height of her craft. Zerbst confronts a diverse range of subject, from the ephemeral Butterflies, Moths and Wings to grittier topics such as the aftermath of Cambodia’s brutal past in Remembering S-21, Cambodia. All are approached with masterly skill. Zerbst’s control of poetic traditions enlivens her thought-provoking poetry. She is able to wield her pen with a surgeon’s skill as she dissects all aspects of the human condition. It’s a long time since I’ve read poetry which was written with such technical prowess while also resonating with the sensitivities of its perceptive author.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
I get a lot of emails and questions about how to get a book of poetry published. Firstly not many publishers do it. (That is publish poetry). It is not a financially sensible thing to do. So as a poet think about it from the publisher’s point of view for a minute.
You don’t stand a chance of getting your collection published unless you have a name as a poet, or are a well known writer who also writes poetry. Or you are a well known rugby player or have some other claim to fame and also write poetry. So how do you become a more established poet without having a collection?
1. Buy and read the work of poets who have had their work published. Do this regularly. See what is hot and happening. Subscribe to at least one literary magazine.
2. Attend live poetry readings – Off the Wall in Cape Town, launches and readings. Poetry Africa in Durbs. Jozi Spoken Word Festival.
3. Send your work to the literary magazines. Google the following names – New Coin, Litnet, New Contrast, Carapace. As far as I know Gary Cummiskey of Green Dragon invites submissions from particular writers and doesn’t have an open submission policy. There are other literary magazines and perhaps those who are reading the blog can add names and thoughts.
4. Before you submit your collection to a publisher – ask a published poet whose work you like/admire to read your manuscript. You will have to pay them to read it and tell you if in their opinion it is publishable. You could do a Creative Writing course either at a university or a short course. Get feedback on your poems.
5. When you have reached this stage, I can recommend people to edit your work (once again you will have to pay for this). It will cost about R2000 or so (Sept 2009).
6. If you can say Yes, to all the above steps, then you need to go through your collection and choose the ones that fit together in some way. A first collection that will comfortably be published as a thin volume, needs to be about 56 or 64 pages. But remember that the book will be typeset and remember that you need at least 7 or 8 pages for front matter and end matter.
If you can’t find a publisher, it is OK to self-publish. It is harder work and a bit less prestigious, but at least you get your work out there and you will find your readers or they will find you. Don’t leave out any of Steps 1 to 6 above, or your book will not be as good as it could be.
Other publishers who publish poetry – Deep South, Botsotso, Aerial (if you are part of the Creative Writing group in Grahamstown). For most other publishers you either have to be as well known as Gabeba Baderoon or Antjie Krog. Or you have to be a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at UCT.
Please read the comments at the bottom of this post too, I am going to get all the knowledgeable people I know to comment and add their wisdom if they would.
A book I am thrilled to be bringing out in April is The Everyday Wife by Phillippa Yaa de Villiers. I met her while working at the Centre for the Book. We both participated in the British Council sponsored Crossing Borders programme in 2005/6. At the final workshop we got to read our writing, and Phillippa read a sonnet about her son that brought me to tears. Since that first meeting, we worked together on her first collection, Taller than Buildings, for which she received a Community Publishing grant, have seen each other at various Cape Town book fairs and here on Book SA, and now we have this new relationship. It’s an honour to publish her new collection. Phillippa has an extraordinary energy and facility with words and images.
