Publisher: Hands-On Books, South Africa
The Love Sheet
The title should have warned me. On reading the title poem, I realise
any of the poems is a gateway into this passion with compassion, into a
garden whose fragrances colour every sound lovers make when words have
to cope. Make the lovers poets, see how each facet is etched, each jewel
worked and polished. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.
£21.00
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.
Jacques
Coetzee, born in 1972, matriculated from the Pioneer School for the
Blind in Worcester. He has worked as a busker at the Cape Town
Waterfront, and has tutored English literature to first- and second-year
university students. In 2002 he obtained a Masters in Creative Writing
from the University of Cape Town, and in 2018, he and Barbara Fairhead
published a joint anthology of poems, The Love Sheet. He currently lives
in Cape Town, where he is a singer-songwriter in the band Red Earth
& Rust.
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
“From the blind to the seeing, from the seeing to the blind … this
volume is a compelling declaration of love and radiance, and
transformation.”
Petra Müller