Publisher: African Perspectives, South Africa
This selection of
poems – covering the years from 1980 to the present day – expresses the
poets personal attempts at making sense of the everyday, ordinary
difficulties, and the small victories of life. The offering emphasises,
sometimes in an exploratory suggestiveness, how differences should not
be divisive and that they form part of the range of ways in which we
belong to – and are of – each other.
Price range: £15.00 through £16.00
About the author
The Rev. Michael Weeder is the dean of St. George’s Cathedral in Cape Town, South Africa.
Review
“Here
icons are humanised. Archbishop Tutu’s giggle becomes ‘a choir of
naughty angels.’ Everyday struggle is blessed. The unfashionable, like
the ‘hettie hare nie’ Cape Flats girls, is honoured un-patronisingly.
Looking back, looking forward, all the false certitudes of racialised
identity get stirred around in this poetic bredie. It affirms who we all
might be. Michael Weeder provides a voice needed in a time ‘ when
freedom still ain’t free.’”
Jeremy Cronin – Writer, author, poet and former Deputy Minister of Public Works and Transport and former Deputy General Secretary of the South African Communist Party. (SACP)
“A delightful collection of poems that take us back to the days
of Biko, ghoema, jazz, pianos, dance and coffee, dangling from the lips
and hips of the Cape, bursting with energy, overflowing with pride. A
wonderful collection of poems of yesteryear, a memory box to be
cherished and shared with the generation of today. Weeder’s poetry makes
us feel as though we are right there in the room, on the street: taking
pleasure in Cape culture, and remembering why we matter.”
Rozena Maart
“Michael Weeder’s The Promise of Memory is an education in expansive
love and historical consciousness. The poems cross boundaries of race,
gender and creed to teach us what a politics of emancipatory possibility
entails and demands an ethic of accountability. His loving testimonies
of historical figures who expanded our imaginations and provided new
liberatory horizons are a route to memory that is delicate and nuanced
which refuses forgetting or stereotypes. In Michael Weeder’s poetry of
family, friendship, romantic love and loss we meet love and mourning
under conditions of political violence and repression that offers hope
for worlds in which flourishing is possible.”
Kharnita Mohamed – Lecturer of Anthropology, University of Cape Town and author of Called to Song
“Art is activism and hope. Here we are reminded that memory is also
hope.”
Tricia Sibbons – Social change leader and coach and the 2020 recipient of the Archbishop of Cape Town’s Peace with Justice Award