Now the World Takes These Breaths
ISBN 9781920590536
Pages 66
Dimensions 203 x 133mm
Published 2014
Publisher Modjaji Books, South Africa
Format Paperback

Now the World Takes These Breaths

by Joan Metelerkamp

As we have come to expect with Joan Metelerkamp's work, these poems can be read individually or, more rewardingly, as a body, from cover to cover. Formal but fluent, the 'sonnets' ('soundings') of this sequence marry cycle and narrative, old and new, secular and sacred, momentary and eternal. This is a strange and immediately familiar book -: at its simplest it traces the story of a mother's 'letting-go' her grown children, a daughter's relocation to the Northern hemisphere, a wedding, shadows of deaths and losses, sparks of joy. It recalls the story of Demeter and Persephone, but goes on from there in immediately accessible South African, contemporary terms. Above all, it celebrates!

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About the Author

Joan Metelerkamp

Joan Metelerkamp is one of South Africa’s foremost poets. She is the author of seven previous books of poems. Her poetry is quite different to that of most of her local contemporaries and has been favourably compared to that of Anne Carson and Louise Glück. Her work won literary prizes (SANLAM, Sydney Clouts) in the early 1990s and later she judged the DALRO and Ingrid Jonker prizes. Her poems have been widely published in local and international anthologies of South African poetry, and she has taken part in readings and literary lifestivals here and in Europe and America. She edited the South African poetry journal New Coin for some years and has also written poetry reviews and essays.

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