John Trimbur, Professor of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College, Boston

"Skin Rafts is a remarkable addition to Kelwyn Sole’s previous seven volumes of prizewinning poetry, from the The Blood of Our Silence in the struggle years to the post-apartheid ‘kaleidophone’ of South African voices in Land Dreaming and the growing impatience and heartbreak over the failure of the anti-apartheid dream in Walking, Falling. The opening poem ‘Prelude’ sets Sole’s task in Skin Rafts: ‘I need to find out/who you are, who I am – we grow old in this place!/ No one was born for this, here no one can smile:/ you are my neighbour: surely you know?’ A dialectic of ‘foreboding’ and ‘yearning’ animates Skin Raft, as the poems register the ‘sorrows and calamities’ that ‘pile up’ in the new South Africa, the ‘detritus of commerce and history,’ the bad faith and extinguished hopes. Sole’s explorations of poetic form include landscape (‘landscoping’) poems, love poems, anti-pastorals, poems about birds, political poems (like “Comprador’ and ‘The empty space we call Mandela’), social satire, reflections on poetry, poems about ‘whiteness,’ and an aubade, or morning love song borrowed from the troubadours that turns into an exquisite meditation on time and mortality. Kelwyn Sole is at the height of his poetic powers in Skin Rafts, unreconciled, in search of a poetics and politics of human warmth, companionship, and solidarity.  ‘I’ve grown old within the parched/ landscape of the heart,’ he writes. ‘So why would/ anyone like me—or you now reading/ find value in a gentleness come suddenly/ down upon us all, or seek out its delight?/ How on earth do we move on from here?"