Playing with my Christianity

Playing with My Christianity is the second volume of Basil du Toit's Collected Sonnets, and brings to a close his archival selection from the over 600 sonnets he wrote between 2011 (when he retired) and 2021. Du Toit likens these poems to short excursions through material substances, brief suffusions in the weft and weight of the world - they are thus conceived of as sensory experiences before they are thought of as intellectual meanings. Written on the third floor of Edinburgh University's Main Library (where most of the university's rich archive of world literatures is held) these high-spirited poems are as much an expression of Du Toit's relief at having been released from the miseries of paid employment, as exuberant journeys of discovery in their own right. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Basil du Toit was born in Cape Town in 1951, but spent much of his childhood in Botswana, at that time the British Protectorate of Bechuanaland. He recalls trading the secrets of a magic trick with a Tswana man who in exchange taught him how to say a few words in the rapidly vanishing / Xam language of the Kalahari Bushmen. This proximity of fragile language to the magical fashioning of reality continues to inform his writing.