Böcker av Joan Metelerkamp

This is Joan Metelerkamp's ninth book of poems. Her previous book, also published by Modjaji, Now the World Takes these Breaths (2014) was one of three on the short list for the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. Her poems have appeared in many South African anthologies. As well as poems she has written reviews and essays about South African poetry, and read in most festivals in South Africa as well as in Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro and Paris. She has been an associate of the Institute for the Study of English in Africa, as a part-time teacher on the MA in creative writing at Rhodes University; before that, for five years, she edited New Coin poetry journal.

As we have come to expect with Joan Metelerkamp's work, these poems can be read individually or, more rewardingly, as a body, from cover to cover. Formal but fluent, the 'sonnets' ('soundings') of this sequence marry cycle and narrative, old and new, secular and sacred, momentary and eternal. This is a strange and immediately familiar book -: at its simplest it traces the story of a mother's 'letting-go' her grown children, a daughter's relocation to the Northern hemisphere, a wedding, shadows of deaths and losses, sparks of joy. It recalls the story of Demeter and Persephone, but goes on from there in immediately accessible South African, contemporary terms. Above all, it celebrates!