latest acquisitions

There haven't been many, but there have been a few.

At the first night of the Poetry Africa performances I was able to attend I found a book by Robert Berold, Rain Across a Paper Field -- at deep discount. Liesl Jobson, a South African poet who has been tremendously helpful to me in the lead up to this trip, had earlier mentioned Berold as a poet and publisher worth knowing in Grahamstown (my next stop).

So I will. Know. At least a little.

And then this afternoon, as I was headed home from my wander, I decided to pop back into the Adams Booksellers shop at the Musgrave Center and walked out and into the rain with:

Denis Hirson, The House Next Door to Africa
Charl-Pierre Naudé, Against the Light
Tania van Schalkwyk, Hyphen

I've had the pleasure of trading a few emails with Naudé and the Hirson book, though not poetry, is slim, written in pieces, and also was at deep discount (can you detect a theme here?). Van Schalkwyk is completely new to me.

I had also picked up Megan Hall's The Fourth Child which received the 2008 Ingrid Jonker Prize. Now it's totally unfair to base one's assessment on a cursory reading of only a few poems while standing in bookshop, but... I left it behind.

You need not, and can read more about Hall's collection on the Poetry International website.

As for the others. Well... hopefully, before too long, you can read more about them here on the african poetry review.

Though here's a teaser for Naudé's collection and
one for van Schalkwyk's Hyphen too.

Addendum: Just couldn't help myself after tonight's reading -- though why should I, being one of the main reasons I'm here, after all -- and scanned the Adams Booksellers table one more time, walking away with Mongane Wally Serote's History is the Home Address from 2004 (which he had just read from) and his first, Yakhal'inkomo. I also scooped up Lesego Rampolokeng's Bantu Ghost - a stream of (black) unconsciousness, the book version of one of his pieces for the stage.