The Book of Unrest

An ocean of
floodwater. Shipwrecked toddlers. Skeletons that rise from pristine
beaches. In his second book of poems, Nick Mulgrew confronts the natural
and human disasters of the eastern South African coast – and, in the
process, himself.

An unflinching examination of ancestry and place, of ruined childhoods and a troubled present, The Book of Unrest
conjures a world of alternating beauty and horror; a series of tainted
land-, city and seascapes, increasingly hostile to those living in them.
Drawing upon the wisdom of other Durban writers, Mulgrew interrogates
the purposes of poetry and politics in such a fraught time and place.
Can our traumas be learned from, or do they only shackle us to the past?

In turns elegiac and nihilistic, witty and desperate, sprawling
and precise, these poems sift through personal and collective histories
of mistrust and violence, to find what, if anything, can bring us rest.