Publisher: Hands-On Books, South Africa
KIN
Selected poems, song lyrics and prose sketches
A generous portrait of an artist at the height of her powers of perception. In these poems, sketches and song lyrics, crafted over a lifetime, we come to share in the adventure of stepping out of what Grenfell Fairhead calls the “house of orthodoxy.” What binds these pieces together is her exuberance, and the sense that we are always at the beginning. Again and again, one feels a sense of things just beyond the range of the senses, waiting for us to catch up with them. In each landscape she describes, one feels her sensibility in sympathy with it, finding a place in it. As she remembers and argues with herself, mourns and celebrates, we find ourselves accompanying her on this voyage of discovery with our own full attention.
£40.00 – £42.00
About the author
Barbara Grenfell Fairhead is an artist, writer, poet and lyricist. She was born in the United Kingdom in 1939 and has lived most of her life in South Africa. After her first visit to New Mexico in the early 1990s it became her second home. She made many extended visits over a period of twenty years, staying in her casita close to Black Mesa. Many of her poems and haiku were inspired by that landscape, as well as some of her prose writings, and her trilogy of novels. She lives in Cape Town now. Her most recent books are Rio Abajo Rio/River Beneath River – a poetically written, post-creation myth and KIN, her collected poems.
Review
Fairhead and Coetzee have produced a collection that is
distinguished by its crafting as well as its beauty. Their voices gather
resonance in conversation, until the poems reveal a hunger for shared
experience, and a receptiveness to the intimacies of each moment.
Reading these poems at one sitting is akin to stumbling onto a recital
by two very accomplished soloists—perhaps in a clearing, in a forest.
This is a brave and beautiful book, and the cumulative impact of the
poems is nothing short of astonishing.
Eduard Burle
‘Eppel is a poet with a compulsive gift for the telling image …he has clung to a Southern African idiom and concerns, even though expert in a “world language.’
Geoffrey Haresnape
Related books
The Book of Unrest
£13.00
Obesiance to Frogs
£15.00 – £16.00