Author: regrum

In Makhanya/Grahamstown for the National Arts Festival, I attended on Tuesday a Poetryfest event, this being two hours focusing on a poetic theme. Poetryfest is new, the initiative of the multi-talented Tsitsi Sachikonye. I had expected poet Harry Owen to be focusing, in his talk about  the “Playfulness of Poetry,” on what might be called… Continue reading The Playfulness of Poetry

The Cull, new and resurrected poems by Harry Owen I received The Cull, a book of new and previously published poems, from Harry Owen some time ago and have put off reading it because work had taken my mind in other demanding, non-literary directions. In my experience, Harry’s poetry – and let’s dispense with artificial… Continue reading Harry Owen, a poet of the natural world and more

Well, not exactly love poems. To be sure, the poetry of Kerry Hammerton deals with the emotion that has fuelled thousands of poems, but it's earthier than that, locating emotion in the body that is the site of lust and other longing as we age. Her verse has been called brave, but while she eschews… Continue reading Love poems at Love Books

What can would-be poets do while waiting for inspiration to keep from getting rusty? One tactic is translation. To translate properly entails getting to grips with the fine grain of language as well as tapping into creativity to capture the actual rather than the literal meaning of words and idioms. This exercises the poet's imagination… Continue reading Poetry translation

The David Krut bookstore on Jan Smuts is an intimate setting, and the venue was full to overflowing when I attended on Saturday afternoon September 30 one of the bookstore’s Word Art at 151 events. This was the launch of Phillipa Yaa de Villiers’ volume “ice cream headache in my bone”. Keorapetse Kgositsile, Myesha Jenkins… Continue reading Two poetry readings, one country