New Coin Poetry - Volume 50, Issue 2, December 2014

Welcome to this bumper, 210-page, 50^th anniversary edition of New Coin. By bringing together over 100 poems by 57 poets, we hope to showcase the wide range of voices at work in South African poetry. One of South African society's strengths is its diversity, which is reflected in its culture, and most certainly in its poetry. This special edition also includes a symposium on the state of South African poetry today.

Alan Finlay : accept this; Untitled; Poem to a future wife

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Moira Lovell : Road

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Arja Salafranca : You wake softly; Sunday night breath

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Mxolisi Nyezwa : I want the dead men to see the flying birds; It does not rest; White death in winter

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Abigail George : The arrival of the paper tiger empress; Haiku for Ann Quin

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Rethabile Masilo : Cape Town; Blue

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Khulile Nxumalo : RSA 2014

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Bernard Levinson : Meeting; I see you

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Kobus Moolman : Dear Letter; There is a spider

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Angifi Dladla : A short man; Seven soldiers laughed on Christmas Day

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Genna Gardini : Whale watching; The Narcissist's Guide to Electronics; Bleed Us Not Into Temptation

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Medzani Musandiwa : War of attrition; And the Nigerian Man is praying

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Kyle Allan : W.H. Auden; Sonata

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Kelwyn Sole : Tourists; Ocean; Platteland

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David Wa Maahlamela : the last ecuadorian salsa; Borotho; the distance of the dead

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Natalia Molebatsi : Jozburg we want to fly; Dance with me; After the shelling

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Dashen Naicker : Mtunzini; Bushbuck Avenue

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Nazlee Arbee : The 7 o'clock news; The walls of a tin-roofed shack

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Joop Bersee : A day; Shore

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Diana Bloem : Clatter

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Dawn Garisch : Flake

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Sindiswa Busuku-Mathese : Mother's Lyric; Mother's Lyric (ii); Mother's Lyric (iii)

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Raphael D'abdon : the night i and my lady shared an apple; at night we still remember you; at the madnouse

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Gerard Rudolf : Joburg Lullaby; 14th Avenue, Tshawne (née Pretoria)

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Mick Raubenheimer : Her toes; Purr

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Saaleha Idrees Bamjee : After the miscarriage; By Heart

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Unathi Slasha : Nobody weeps for Brutus; Value

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Vonani Bila : Why I am not a teacher

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Lesego Rampolokeng : Word to Serote

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Gail Dendy :Jimmy; An unusual proposal of marriage

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Jim Pascual Agustin : Light and the consequences of seeing; Someday someone will say this against me

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Jeannie Wallace Mckeown : Jeffrey's Bay wind farm triptych; In sickness and divorce; In everything

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Brett Beiles : Haiku; Before the Fall; Love's Labour's Lost; Lost in Translation; In the Beginning ...; Reverse Haiku

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Hans Pienaar : God of cheating; Goddess of love

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Colleen Higgs : Practising; The limited attractions of Australia; for the elderly and the dead

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Mphutlane Wa Bofelo : He & she

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Erica Glyn Schofield : Hole

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Robert Berold : Blind ear

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Lionel Murcott : Mortal; Naked

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Marike Beyers : nothing looked back; why he went to the army

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Denis Hirson : Camera obscura; Three things warthogs know; If I were paper

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Lee-Mari Gower : Strings of attachment; Solitary

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Elmé Vivier : In between it all; After your chemo; Slowly

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John Simon : Dire warning

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Maruping Phepheng : Clouds darken as they clear; The journey of a quarry

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Justine Joseph : New shoes

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Leslie Howard : Vagrant lover

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Damain Garside : Newton

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Haidee Kruger : Bookshelf; Smock; 7/2014

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Julian De Wette Albert Kamimbi : open season; The Cape of Good Hope, 1960s

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Linda Ndlovu : Skhothane *Fashion cult*; Legend would have it; We go back to the mountains

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Tim Van Niekerk : Waving

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Tony Ullyat : Into the gaping maw: on moving house

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Mbongeni Khumalo : Childbirth; Facebook frenzy; House of Fools

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Allan Kolski Horwitz : The back of the head of the guitar; Voice of a homeless woman

South African poetry is in a perennial state of war. Poets, like mercenaries, huddle inside the walls of the falling buildings, the country's barracks. Poetry which must reach out like leaves beyond our souls' borders is ensnared by a colonial language, English.

Dear Kobus

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Thank you for your letter. I am glad you are well, and writing. I look forward to your new collection. I am sorry I could not have been there to celebrate your fiftieth birthday.

The suggestion that South African poetry of the millennium has lost some of the excitement generated by the passionate urges of the immediately post-liberation period is a challenging statement. While spoken word poetry is flourishing, the relative doldrums that have becalmed published poetry can be seen in the decline of anthologies and individual collections produced, as well as the crimped space now given to discussion about poetry issues in the popular cultural media, at book fairs and in university curricula. Moreover, the generation of poets who instigated the excitement of the 1990s are now older, and their favoured themes more familiar.

The wind is warm, in the evening air, under the stars. Five South Africans sit at a fire sharing poems. Their work is sophisticated considering the paltry state of poetry elsewhere in the globe. With advanced literary techniques like anaphora and anthropomorphism their words weave into the night sky. The year is 10 000 BCE. The four are |Xam people, ravelling poetic tales and 'tradition' before TS Eliot's language invented the word. Before Homer's, before Valmiki's. You'd think some 12 000 years later, the land of the eland would have one of the leading poetic traditions in the world. Buried strings aren't easily unravelled. What can be said of poetry then, 12 000 years later, in a country suffused with the only elements essential for the artform, blood and beauty? How can it be said?

In a commentary on the state-of-the-art of contemporary South African poetry titled "Remembering Stephen Watson: A Legacy at Risk" (1), poet and scholar David Tyfield maintains that the latter is in trouble because Watson's lesson has been forgotten (unlearned? ignored?), and the few surviving Watsonian versifiers of the country (category to which he, presumably, belongs) are an endangered species under attack by the pervasive and corrosive exuberance of ideologically-blind scribblers.

Below are three poems published in the 70s. they are examples of, for me, writing that does not go with how, in the brief, poetry before 94 is said to have been. And they are not freak-exceptions. Experimentation has for a long time been a part of S.A. lit. I could provide more such, Wopko Jensma would feature prominently in that set-up.

As the publisher of Modjaji Books I don't want to discuss the state of South African poetry at a macro level. What I want to do is to invite you to look at the Modjaji Books and Hands-On Books poetry lists. As of the 30 June 2014 we had published 27 new collections of poetry. All of these titles can be seen on our website www.modjajibooks.co.za where you will see the range, depth and variety of voices that we have published since 2007. Our very first title was a poetry collection, Megan Hall's Fourth Child; it went on to win the Ingrid Jonker prize in 2008. Since then Beverly Rycroft was also awarded the Ingrid Jonker prize in 2012 for her collection, missing. We have had our poets receive other prizes and honours. Phillippa Yaa de Villiers won the 2011 SALA poetry prize and she is the Commonwealth Poet for 2014.

Writing a few years before the end of apartheid, Chris van Wyk sets out to explain to his readers how to vote, soaking his words in irony: "The ballot./ This means voting./ There's this big box./ It has a slot./ Ja, like a money box [ . . .]" Today, after twenty years of democracy, David wa Maahlamela feels free to write in his poem "Autobiography" that he will not go to the polls, adding "I refuse to be anyone's spanner or hammer; I enjoy biting the hand that feeds me/ especially when it feeds me poison."

In the first editorial statement of New Coin in 1965, under the editorship of Guy Butler, the new journal characterised itself as follows: "We still believe that the art of poetry, as it is the oldest, is still the most delicate instrument we possess for finding out who and where we are." Here, poetry is viewed as a delicate instrument of discovery - the poem as compass, or scalpel, or microscope - to explore the meshwork of identity and place. But whose instrument is it? Who wields it? And whose self, and place, is the instrument meant to discover?

Like so much in South African literature (and in every other sphere of our lives), poetry is conditioned as much by class, colour and language as by imagination, intellect, love of word play and a desire to explore new forms. And this being the case, our fragmented history - a narrative of settlement, conquest, domination and now post-colonial disenchantment - is reflected in every poetry platform, magazine, anthology and website. This is with regard to which poets are presented and/or published, the predominant themes and styles they choose, as well as the politics, identity and predispositions of the editors.

On 7 July 2014 at Wordfest, in the National Arts Festival, a reading was held to honour the poet Mafika Gwala. Gwala, who wrote in English and Zulu, was an important activist in the Black Consciousness period of the 1970s-80s, and he remained radical in his views long after the momentum of the BC movement had faded.

In an article published a number of years ago ('The paper city: women, writing and experience'), poet and critic Helen Kidd speaks about a variety of feminist poetics "based on observations of how women interact together and how, in conversation, threads are dropped, picked up again, sentences unfinished and then reformulated later on", which are derived from those "creatively used moments which women find for themselves feeding babies at dawn, between flights of stairs at dusk .... or all the other varieties of making that accompany domestic moments... ." This is, in my opinion, a useful prism through which to begin viewing to the poetry of Joan Metelerkamp. Even as her style does shift and evolve between collections, such a constant weaving of themes and shuttling between connections can be seen in the shifting patterns and reiterations in her poems. These interweavings are sometimes fraught, sometime radiant, but always ineluctable. The subject matter of individual poems may sometimes make this more obvious, as in the poem 'Giving away' in this collection; where the actual task of sewing is described in minute particulars.

Denis Hirson, the South African poet now living in France, has once again edited an anthology of poetry, this one spanning the years 1996-2013. Prior to this anthology, Hirson edited The Lava of This Land: South African Poetry 1960-1996 (Northwestern University, 1997). This present anthology, with 135 poems from 32 poets, arose as a result of the Festival international de poètes en Val de Marne held between 24 May and 2 June 2013. The organisers, impressed by the readings of the South African contingent who had attended the festival, proposed a French anthology devoted to South African poetry, which Hirson offered to edit. This resulted in the anthology Pas des blessure, pas d'histoire (November 2013), a special issue of the literary journal Bachannales, whose editors, as Hirson says in his Introduction, gave him 'a free hand in constituting the French anthology which was made in tandem with this one.'