Land Dreaming

Kelwyn Sole's brilliant new collection is a volume of landscapes, voices and dreams, and a roving, meditative self. With a perfect ear and eye he captures an extraordinary array of scenarios, characters and places, where land, sea and sky are also an abiding presence. His modes shift from the filmic to the interior monologue, his tones from the wickedly satirical to the poignant, the raucously contentious to the intimate. In Sole's hands the prose poem becomes the perfect form. Full of arresting lines and images, its constellations create something that reads almost like a novel. It taps into the dream beneath the surface of South Africa.