Deep South – förlag

This book is a redesigned second printing of Seitlhamo Motsapi's acclaimed "Earthstepper", first published in 1996. This collection brilliantly fuses pan-Africanist militancy, romantic spirituality, and scathing attach on neo-colonialism in its global and local forms. The political urgency is never compromised by empty rhetorical posturing or aesthetic banality: this is a rich, experimental poetry, raining down fresh imagery, complex concepts, carefully patterned to produce a volume of striking originality and stylistic rigour.

South African Poetry 1996-2013 presents work by 32 poets and includes some translations from Afrikaans, isiXhosa, isiZulu, Sesotho and Xitsonga. This collection follows on from Denis Hirson’s 1997 anthology The Lava of this Land: South African Poetry 1960-1996.South African poetry today is charged with restlessness, bursting with diversity. Gone is the intense inward focus required to deal with a situation of systematic oppression, the enclosing effort of concentration on a single predicament. While politics and identity continue to be central themes, the poetry since the late 1990s reveals a richer investigation of ancestors and history, alongside more experimentation with language and translation; and enduring concern with the touchstones of love, loss, memory, and acts of witnessing.Poets include: Jim Pascual Agustin ~ Gabeba Baderoon ~ Robert Berold ~ Vonani Bila ~ Jeremy Cronin ~ Ingrid de Kok ~ Isobel Dixon ~ Finuala Dowling ~ Khadija Tracey Heeger ~ Denis Hirson ~ Ronelda Kamfer ~ Keorapetse Kgositsile ~ Katharine Kilalea ~ Rustum Kozain ~ Antjie Krog ~ David wa Maahlamela ~ Bongekile Joyce Mbanjwa ~ Joan Metelerkamp ~ Kobus Moolman ~ Isabella Motadinyane ~ Petra Müller ~ Gert Vlok Nel ~ Mxolisi Nyezwa ~ Karen Press ~ Mongane Wally Serote ~ Ari Sitas ~ Kelwyn Sole ~ Rosamund Stanford ~ Toni Stuart ~ Nathan Trantraal ~ Marlene van Niekerk ~ Bulelani Zantsi.

Skeptical Erections is a book of startling visual and verbal imagination. In his poems Sapeta describes the deception and self-loathing prevalent in the people he encounters in his world, including (or perhaps especially) himself. Despite their distortions, however, the characters who come alive in these poems are depicted with respect and compassion.

In simple vocabulary a naked bone describes complex states of beauty and suffering, often at the borderline where life meets death. In their dreamlike rhythms and images, the poems draw strength from Xhosa culture, Christianity, and elements of nature. They are love poems in the widest sense, embracing the interface between daily life and the spiritual, enacting joy and caring in the face of deprivation and mourning.

Haidee Kotze (formerly Haidee Kruger) is the author of Lush: Poems for Four Voices (Protea, 2007) and The Reckless Sleeper (Modjaji, 2014). She is a researcher in linguistics, focusing on language variation and change, and translation.

Ari Sitas is a distinguished sociologist, novelist, dramatist, a founder member of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company, and a cultural activist celebrated for his work in popular and worker theatre. As a poet he has written eight books, and collaborated with many visual artists and musicians. His poems are passionate, politically undaunted and wide-ranging, expressed with the exploratory instinct of a jazz improviser.

South African poetry today is charged with restlessness, burstng with diversity. Gone is the intense inward focus required to deal with a situation of systematic oppression, the enclosing effort of concentration on a single predicament. While politics and identity continue to be central themes, the poetry since the late 1990s reveals a richer investigation of ancestors and history, alongside more experimentation with language and translation; and enduring concern with the touchstones of love, loss, memory, and acts of witnessing. In the Heat of Shadows: South African Poetry 1996-2013 presents work by 33 poets and includes some translations from Afrikaans, isiXhosa, isiZulu, Sesotho and Xitsonga. This collection follows on from Denis Hirsonís 1997 anthology The Lava of this Land: South African Poetry 1960-1996.

Kobus Moolman has published six previous collections of poetry, and several plays. He has been awarded the Ingrid Jonker prize, the PANSA award, the South African Literary Award, the DALRO poetry prize and the Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry award. He teaches creative writing at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

VONANI BILA was born in 1972 in Shirley village, Limpopo, where he still lives. He is the author of five books of poems in English and eight story-books for newly literate adult readers in Sepedi, Xitsonga and English. Bila is a driving force in South African poetry - founding editor of the Timbila poetry journal, publisher of Timbila books and founder of Timbila Writers'' Village, a rural retreat centre for writers. Married with three children, he teaches in the Department of English Studies at the University of Limpopo, and in the MA in Creative Writing at Rhodes University.

I was grateful for the death sentence the doctors gave me. It meant no more words, no more summons ringing out in hallucinations and fevers, an end neat as the edge of the world, where the sun drops into the sea. I walked through the world saying goodbye with a clean heart. They hollowed my bones for flight. My life moves in me there, urgent as air. There is language that comes up spare and bright as bone from a break. It stands beneath us like rock in the place where there is nothing else left. It is the language of nothing more.

Isabella Motadinyane was born in 1963 in Mofolo Central, Soweto, and died on her fortieth birthday in 2003 in Orange Farm. She used English, Isicamtho and Sesotho to create a powerful legacy of performance, poetry, and song. Her collected work - just over 30 poems - was published as Bella in 2007 by Botsotso Publishing, and is republished in this Deep South edition with some new translations from the Sesotho.

Walking, Falling is Kelwyn Soleis seventh collection of poetry. It extends and deepens themes that emerged in his earlier books: love and human relationships; the exposing of false and clichEd perspectives in our socio-political life; our relationship as South Africans to land and landscape. Rustum Kozain has written about his work: iWhether the theme is the end of a relationship or the murder of immigrants, there is the calm look of analysis, a voice, like a conscience, that threatens to disturb the readeris complacency, but a voice simultaneously gentle with empathy and sincerity.i

A man loves a woman who lives on one continent and is a devoted father to his two sons who live on another - a situation that finds him sometimes in unbearable anguish. That Kind of Door describes his life/lives, in a lyrical sequence of taut musicality and precise sparse imagery.

This place is called SEDING, short for Leseding, place of light. Quite ironic given the darkness throbbing at its core and spilling out bubbling in the blackest rage when least expected. Surrounded by farmland in all directions, it is a settlement of about 700 households crammed in tiny structures. Average 7 souls per hovel. It used to be made up of ramshackle corrugated iron shacks that seemed tossed down regardless of aesthetics. Then the new administrationís housing programme kicked in. Man in the bush in quest of Bosmanís ghost. Finding AWB rabidity. Tranquility so deep it kills. Hate hounds. Beneath the surface quiet, such racist rotten-heartedness. & children dying. Starvation abounds. Raw sewage in the water supply. Crap in the taps. Skin matters. Ancient white beards sexing black teens for tins, food exchange. The soulís impoverishment. The starved get their humanity halved. And weekends of sex-tourism. Alcoholic stares everywhere. Deep fear too. Lesego Rampolokengís third novel Bird-Monk Seding is a stark picture of life in a rural township two decades into South Africaís democracy. Listening and observing in the streets and taverns, Bavino Sekete, often feeling desperate himself, is thrown back to his own violent childhood in Soweto. To get through, he turns to his pantheon of jazz innovators and radical writers.

Angifi Dladla is a poet and playwright who writes in both English and Zulu. He is the author of eight plays and a poetry book in Zulu titled Uhambo. For many years he has been a writing teacher and director of Femba Writing Project, publishing school and prison newspapers, and the anthologies Wa lala, Wa sala and Reaching Out: Voices from Groenpunt Maximum-Security Prison. Lament for Kofifi Macu is Angifi Dladla''s first collection of poems in English since The Girl Who Then Feared To Sleep (2001).

Sunrise Poison, co edited with the poet in 1996, is the first of a planned four-volume collected works of Zhuwao, which include fiction, essays and letters, as well as poetry.

Born in Orlando West, Soweto, in Johannesburg, Lesego Rampolokeng is a poet, novelist, playwright, filmmaker and writing teacher who rose to prominence in the 1980s, a turbulent period in South Africais history. Originally published in 1999, The Bavino Sermons includes such memorable poems as eLines for Vincenti, eRiding the victim traini, eTo Gil Scott-Heroni, eCrab attacki,eRap Rantingi and eThe Fela Sermoni.

Chris van Wykís first (and only) book of poems, It Is Time to Go Home, was published in 1979 when he was just 22. He went on to become a well-known and much-loved writer of memoirs, biographies, and childrenís stories. But he continued to write poems; some were published in literary magazines and some in his autobiographical book Shirley, Goodness & Mercy (2004). This volume brings together a selection of these poems, along with a substantial selection from his first book.

after troy, Taban lo Liyong''s booklength poem, is an expansive and engaging elaboration of two classical Greek texts, Homer''s Odyssey and Aeschylus''s Oresteia. Its focus is the homecoming from the Trojan war of two hero-kings, Odysseus and Agamemnon. Lo Liyong recreates their thoughts and speech, adding dialogue from other characters, most of them women, who are not given a voice in the original stories. after troy is also a philosophical enquiry into retribution and justice.

Yellow Shade evokes the stark textures of township and rural community life: the beauty and passion, the cruelty and humour, the noise, music and stillness. Sediteís poems are constructed from unpredictable images ñ ëa rain-sniffing windí, ëthe knuckles of chairsí, a cupboard ëwailing like a dog left alone in a garageí ñ in a gritty language entirely her own.

Richard Fox was born in Cape Town in 1975. He lives in Johannesburg and runs the T-shirt company, Tshirt Terrorist. otherwise you well? is his second book of poems, following 876, published in 2007.

The incredible beat of my heart is a provocative collection of short prose, varying in style from suburban-realist to surrealist. Kuit transmits the elusive strangeness of daily life in a deceptively matter-of-fact tone, spiked with bursts of rage, humour, and unmarked detours.

Geruisloos, Ongemerk is ''n aangrypende kortverhaalbundel wat stilisties tussen voorstedelike-realisme en surrealisme wissel. Kuit ondersoek die alledaagse lewe met onverwagte ompaaie, woede en humor.

Bloodred Dragonflies is Agustin''s first book published in South Africa. A selection from three decades of work, it includes new poems and some recently translated versions of poems from the Filipino. His poems, constructed from subtle images, close observations of nature and refracted memories, demonstrate how innocence can stay alive under the most difficult conditions.

I have lived in Bhlawa all my life, from the day or night I was born in Madala Street. For 33 years I lived in my parentsí house. For the 21 years since then, I have lived in a flat made of red bricks in Ntshekisa Street, a few metres away from the three-roomed house in Madala which I called my home. Iíve visited different places in the world ñ towns, rural homesteads, big cities, but never for too long, and very rarely. But rather, like a ship that is hauled with long ropes over a treacherous sea to a deserted bay, I have been moored to this singular harbour of a township that is inhabited by drowning men.