From the underworld of zama-zama goldminers to the tragicomic closure of a Cape Town Zoo, from stick fighting to punk rock, game lodges to fruit farms, cricket pitches to mermaids, The Interpreters: South Africa's New Nonfiction assembles a range of true stories that are often more far-fetched, and more compelling, than any fiction.Featuring J. M. Coetzee • Kimon de Greef • William Dicey • Alexandra Dodd • Madeleine Fullar...

This Carting Life collects poems that span more than ten years of writing. A fair number of these poems have been published previously in either journals or anthologies, primarily in South Africa, but also abroad in the USA and, in some cases, in translation in France. Within the admittedly small market of poetry (as opposed to other forms of South African literature), the author has some reputation and has recently been awarded the Thomas Pringle Award for a poem published in New Contrast...

In this new collection Rustum Kozain, who won both the Ingrid Jonker Prize (2006) and the Olive Schreiner Prize (2007) for This Carting Life, raises his own bar. Groundwork retains strong connections with Kozain's early work, but it does so while simultaneously introducing a group of poems that indicate the promise of work to come. His voice has strengthened and has a new confidence, making the poems (paradoxically) lighter - though they are not without his trademark seriousness. This is a...

One of South Africa’s greatest living poets selects from her most recent poems and also from the poems and the themes that best represent her from across her long career.Part One of Skinned contains poems about writing, family and love poems. The poems in second part were chosen from a volume featuring a long epic poem based on the life of Lady Anne Barnard from Scotland, who accompanied her husband to Cape Town and lived in the castle there from 1797 until 1802. This volu...

This book is also available as an ebook: buy it from Amazon here.When the Barbarians Arrive is a selected works from Singaporean poet Alvin Pang's five previous collections, including Testing the Silence (1997) and City of Rain (2003). Wry, sensitive and intelligent throughout, the selection ranges from unsentimental love poems to sharply satirical writing. They mock, celebrate and unsettle, at once recognisably national and international...

The first book of poems by Oli Hazzard, this compilation exposes its author as a consummate master of language, a gifted writer of free verse with the ability to write in traditional poetic forms and stretch the forms to their limits. Through lyrical poems and satires, this collection explores contrasting milieus such as city and country and reality and dream, while subjects such as thefts and love affairs are expressed through palindromes, mirrored poems, and homophonic translations.

Mir Mahfuz Ali is an exceptional new voice in British Poetry. A native of what is now Bangladesh, Mahfuz grew up during the difficult period of the early 1970's when the region was struck, first by a devastating cyclone, then by a particularly vicious civil war. As a boy, Mahfuz witnessed atrocities and writes about them with a searing directness in poems like 'My Salma' and the title poem. But much more than this, his trauma becomes transformative, and his poetry the key to unlocking memo...

In Purity of Absence, Dave Margoshes explores love in its waxing and waning, the extravagance of its fullness, the agony of its departure. Like an explorer charting new territory, he casts his eye on the rhythms and syntax of love, observing its aspects both quotidian and rare. The poems in this new collection, Margoshes’s first in a decade, chart the ekg patterns of love, not just the mature love between a man and a woman but love for a parent, friends, knowledge, place and, ultimately, l...

The poems in Blue Heron delineate a passage through grief and change. Here, personal loss is continuous with threats to other species and landscapes. In response, Robinson has uprooted the terrain of language, “what / bestows itself from / the almost-invisible / and its stain.” If these uprootings are casualties of a poetics seeking to redress imbalance and “pollution,” then they are also opportunities to rethink what can exist in the field of poetic language as “roots also quicke...

Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize. A powerful and ambiguous body of water lies at the heart of these poems, with shoals and channels that change with the forty-foot tide. Even the name is fluid -- from one shore, the Bristol Channel, from the other Mr Hafren, the Severn Sea' Philip Gross's meditations move with subtle steps between these shifting grounds and those of the man-made world, the ageing body and that ever-present mystery, the self. Admirers of his work know each new collection is a...

An old idea of reality animates the poems in The Mechanical Bird: things are never what they seem. Opening with a quick-talking disquisition on lying (Keep it simple, tidy, / take a noncommittal stance) and ending with masterly mediation on the workshop and its drawing-board dreams, Asa Boxers debut constantly tests the claims of authenticity over artifice. Objects, settings and everyday details are swept up in an imagination that can never quite shake the sense of the visible worldeven na...

From its opening page -- a refugee's first sight of England -- "Changes of Address" presents a journey through our times, a search for the meaning of 'home'. With its humour and deep honesty, its vivid storytelling, its sense of history and brilliant observations of the here and now, this book of poems is as rich and multi-layered as a novel. It brings together for the first time the whole range of Philip Gross's poetry from the 1980s and 90s -- a generous selection from his Bloodaxe, Fabe...