Umuzi

The poems in Bodyhood open widely to the inside while looking outwards at the connecting points of body and being – in love, in feeling, in the entanglements of desire, and in the many felt senses of human cross-connection. At once reflective, wistful, wry and ironic, they chart the individual’s imprint on a world accessible only through the bonds and affiliations of an embodied life.

About the author

Leon de Kock grew up in Mayfair, Johannesburg. He is head of the School of Literature and Language Studies at Wits and holds degrees from the Universities of Johannesburg, Leeds and South Africa. He is a writer, translator and academic, and has worked as reporter, sub-editor and in the private sector.

He has received the Pringle Prize for Poetry (1985), the FNB Vita/English Academy Prize for Poetry Translation (2000) and the SA Translators’ Award for Outstanding Translation (2000) for his translation of Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf.

Book details

• Bodyhood by Leon de Kock
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  EAN: 9781415200995
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Imraan Coovadia, author of Green-Eyed Thieves, was at the Dubai International Poetry Festival as a guest of the Mohammend Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation.

Coovadia, there to cover the festival, writes that he “found out almost nothing about poetry” but that he did learn some interesting things about the Middle East and South Africa, and the relationship between them:
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Umuzi, the local imprint of Random House, has scheduled a fabulous line up of authors, new books, and talks for the 2008 Cape Town Book Fair. We bring you our schedule in two formats: in images (click photos above for larger views) and as a downloadable pdf (see below).
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Cape Town’s East City precinct was bustling with friends, family and followers of Patrick Cullinan on Thursday night, when the Book Lounge hosted the launch of Escarpments, a selection of Cullinan’s poems stretching from 1973 to 2007.

Carapace and Snailpress publisher Gus Ferguson – who has done much to promote Cullinan’s life and work over the years – welcomed all in attendance and introduced Petra Müller, Cullinan’s artistic contemporary and long-time friend, as the main speaker

Müller mentioned that Patrick had turned 75 the previous day and that the launch was as much about his life as it was about his book. “Words have been Patrick’s life’s work and he has worked at them without tiring,” she said. She then read Cullinan’s “The Astrologer”, to demonstrate how, in her opinion, each poem in the collection “is a necessity”, and that it seldom happens that after decades of knowing someone’s work, “you find that everything is a necessity”.
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Umuzi and the Book Lounge take pleasure in inviting you to the launch of Escarpments, a new selection of poetry by the most important English language poet working in South Africa today.
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Escarpments is a new selection of poems by Patrick Cullinan from his work ranging from 1973 to 2007. Cullinan is widely regarded as a major South African poet. During his distinguished writing career of nearly fifty years, he has won several awards as a poet and a novelist and short-story writer.

His poems are profound, urbane and intelligent, sometimes playful and sometimes lyrical, and always carefully constructed. Although most of his work is clearly situated within the poetic, political, historical and imaginative landscapes of South Africa, many of its references are to European culture, to European poets, and to the experience of living in Europe. His poems are carefully crafted and often lyrical.

Of particular note are his English versions of the Italian poet Montali and other translations of Italian and South African writers.
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Cape Town’s Book Lounge was crowded on Monday night for the store’s first poetry reading, featuring two of South Africa’s most distinguished – and politicised – poets: Jeremy Cronin (More than a Casual Contact) and Ingrid de Kok (Seasonal Fires).

Cronin, an MP and Deputy General Secretary of the South African Communist Party, opened the reading by remarking on President Thabo Mbeki’s recent state of the nation address. He drew on Mbeki’s invocation of the famous opening lines of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” Cronin gave this oppositional construction a name – “dialectical” – and the dialectic between South Africa’s two major cities, Johannesburg and Cape Town, animated his first reading.
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Two of South Africa’s most highly-acclaimed poets, Ingrid de Kok and Jeremy Cronin, will give a joint reading from their latest collections at the Book Lounge in Cape Town next week.

De Kok’s Seasonal Fires brings together the most significant poems from her first three collections, as well as 27 new poems. In particular, her ground-breaking first volume, Familiar Ground, long out of print, is republished almost in its entirety.

Cronin’s More than Just a Casual Contact is also a fourth collection, containing poems that are brilliantly accessible and, at the same time, polished performance pieces. Some poems deal very movingly with personal relationships – between father and children, husband and wife. Others, designed to be performed, are brimful with social commentary.

A poem from each book is given below, after the event details. This is sure to be a popular reading: do arrive early for a good seat!
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Notwithstanding the Cape Town Book Fair launch of Antjie Krog and Fiona Moodie’s Fynbos Fairies / Fynbosfeetjies, a second event to help spread the word about this delight of a book was called for – and so it was that the Gardens Wordsworth was packed two nights ago with rhyme-lovers young and old.

In fact, all three of the authors associated with the book put in appearances: Krog, Moodie and Gus Ferguson, who translated Krog’s fairy rhymes into English – sometimes so well that, as Krog admitted during her introduction, she was forced to revisit and improve upon her original efforts!

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One doesn’t normally put on a tuxedo to read one’s poetry – but Ken Barris had an awards ceremony to get to, and so cut the sharpest figure at last night’s Birds in Words reading at the Cape Town Book Fair.

We managed to dash in and snap a few (grainy) pics while of the book’s poets – tak

The room at the CTICC was filled to capacity – and included the likes of the suddenly highly formidable (as opposed to just formidable) Ivan Vladislavic.

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