A smell my nose is now hunting - Review of Did You Get Married To Her When I Was In The Mental Hospital? by Abigail George

Dear Abigail

Your story, Did You Get Married To Her When I Was In The Mental Hospital? (published by ZamaShort) is not meant to be an easy read. I know it took it out of you to write it, and I am not surprised by that. While I read it, I felt almost as if I were being confronted with the life that might have been mine, had it not been for … what? The two facts of your childhood that distinguish your life and mine most significantly, in my opinion, are, firstly, the fact that you were burdened with the stigma of mental illness. As you write in the 24^th of a total of 25 passages, or prose stanzas, that make up this work: “It was my destiny to call stigma a companion” (The Sea.) Oh, I empathise with you saying how tired you are of the illness:

  

I am tired of being mentally ill, this chronic sickness, this flame, the powers that be. I watch it burn between my fingers. It tastes of Palestine. Cold stone turned into rubble. Make it go away but it doesn’t go away. (Longing, and on Reading that Sad Story ‘Flowers For Algernon’, Here are Some Thoughts.)

 

I was diagnosed with mental illness in my 30s, but I was compelled fiercely to refuse the stigma, because my father told me in no uncertain terms to right myself, he did not want to, or could not, pay for more sessions with the psychiatrist. (I don’t have medical aid, you see.) And I had a three-year-old child to look after. So, I weaned myself gradually off the meds I was told I’d need to take for life, and focused instead, fully, on having to mother, and having to be a wife. You lament that those age-old, anonymous roles weren’t for you – “I could never be wife material […] I could never raise children. Oh, madwomen couldn’t do that” (Longing, and on Reading that Sad Story ‘Flowers For Algernon’, Here are Some Thoughts.) These roles can indeed help, can ground us – as you, too, I think, are finding, by having to look after, to mother, to care for, your two-year-old niece, and your elderly, vulnerable father – ?

 

But back to the illness with which you were loaded at such a young age, as we discover in your bio that precedes your story. As I see it, this load was weirdly and unwillingly (or unwittingly?) linked into the thing you state unequivocally saved you: language, poetry. I will say more to try to explain what I mean by this, but before I do that, I want to name the second significant event that for me distinguishes your and my destinies in, I hope, mutually instructive ways: the fact that both your parents supported and encouraged your writerly gift. We learn from your bio that your father proofread your drafts when you were in your twenties and thirties, and that your mother “recognised my talent for writing early on” and bought you a typewriter, first a manual and then an electric one, wow! And this happened even though she “makes it a point never to read anything I have written”, preferring Barbara Taylor Bradford and Danielle Steele novels. Well, as Richard Bach famously observed: “Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.” Still, your brother, though far from filled with joy over your life, as you describe him, nevertheless published your first book. The bitter contradictions life forces us to accept! And so:

 

Writing was a sign from God […] it gave me a reason to live, a purpose and I could heal myself, and others. (From your Bio)

 

Despite the hatred and the absence of peace around you, despite the sickness inherent in the social structures of school and the nuclear family, despite the fact that your family members, teachers and peers “had no time” for you and “severely bullied” you, “leaving [you] breathless, or half deranged with all the negativity in [your] environment”, you found “a sea of wildflowers” in poetry, “a bed on which [you] could rest the vessel of [your] body.” (From your Bio) That is beautiful. The same motif serves your experience of reading: Reading, you write in Eating Rice and Potatoes with some Steadfast Patience, “is for the wildflowers in our imagination to blossom”.

You begin your story addressing your First Love. Later, in Don’t You Forget About Me, Pinky Swear Promise Me, R., you address your toddler niece, then, in We Need to Discuss Crystal Meth, Struggle, the Healer, and Forgiveness, it’s your brother you’re talking to. And in This is My Convent, you talk directly to Anne Sexton. And then, in Poem for Gaza, Songs for Me, you revert to your First Love, O. Have I got that right? Seeking a hearing, a connection, a conversation – just like any ordinary woman, like any social creature.

I like the way each of your passages, your prose stanzas, begins with a sentence full of capitals, there is something stately and leonine about that.

 

Years in Summer Days.

Let Me Sleep Now in Peace, Please.

I mean, it reminds me of the Lion in Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals, the way you make the words march in, heads held high, bringing that energy of the Unquestionable Arrival of the Sovereign. And that allows, later, for the “vessel of [your] body” to claim her vulnerability in the ‘aquarium’ of your suffering, to announce:

 

I Don’t Know How to Start.

Or:   

The Gap Between Symbol and Reality. (The final passage.)

 

… where the capitals seem to submerge the reader, with equal grandeur, but no longer breathing with lungs, there is almost a having to hold the breath as you write that:

 

The sea began screaming at me.

And:

I held the blueprint of my wound and stopped breathing.

(Finding Machiavellian Turning Points in Having a Nervous Breakdown.)

Henry Lombard calls your story “claustrophobic” in his comment, and remarks that you “prove” writing to be “a holy act of reclamation”. That is what I want to dwell on now, I mean the role of literary language and its implicatedness, as I see it, in illness, and in “the brutality” which “was the same”, whether you were at home reading a magazine “whose words hurt [your] eyes”, and “A refugee camp falls out”; or whether you were in Israel, which you discovered while your mother watered the garden, in Finding Years in Summer Days, or whether Netanyahu speaks, in Gaza is not Dead, and you

 

squeeze blood out of stones in a refugee camp and wash soiled garments in the sea. The aroma of death, the rubbish, and decay, I need to get it off my hands. (Forgiven, but not Forgotten, it Doesn’t Matter you see.)

 

Now you are Lady Macbeth, and all of humanity’s horrors are yours to cleanse. And the reader is with you and it’s awful.

So, what is happening here, the way I see it, is that language is dumping itself into you, into us, via an unchecked flow of sounds and images. You write that “when it appears in the newspaper it has a beating heart” (Finding Years in Summer Days) and there is this sense of the limitlessness, the continuous increment, the boundarylessness, that dreadful slipperiness of the medium you use:

 

I can’t throw out my feminine energies with the past, nor with the pasta water. (Octopus Flowers in the Dark.)

Or:

Nothing grows inside this garden except the dead bodies of children, and snails who were somehow not involved in the Palestinian struggle. (Silence.)

And:

These pills fill me or are they peas? (For Gaza’s Flame Gatherers, Those on the Frontlines and the

Ambulance Chasers.)

 

The snails are actually comical in their non-involvement, a last, languid bastion of feet and feelers in Eden. Even the pills and the peas bring in the curl of a question mark, or is it a shy smile, after their shared p’s – ? But when you “fry the ham in the pan” (A New Love), I accidentally read “harm” for “ham”; and in This is My Convent I see you eat “my friend egg”, and only afterwards realise it’s a perfectly regular “fried egg”. I mean, what is happening is that the language is uncontained, or should that be untamed? The verbal stew of torment is bewildering, the fine details are so awfully human, again I gasp for breath, asking, where is reality, where is the realness of the animal I am, my connection to the wind? I want to run away and breathe an air free of language. Maybe on the mountain, who “have ears and a kind of feminine energy” (Finding Years in Summer Days)? I have to admit that I don’t have the tenacity, I don’t have your ability to live this remarkable destiny of showing the world that the word was NOT God, the word was far, far too HUMAN!

The truth reveals itself. Unlike your mother, who eats an apple “in tiny bite-sized pieces” (Octopus Flowers in the Dark), you “tear the apple apart with [your] teeth” and “deconstruct [dried fruit] on [your] tongue” (A New Love), and “Gaza falls like the neck of a wildflower falls” (For Gaza’s Flame Gatherers, Those on the Frontlines and the Ambulance Chasers.)

So, you are Eve, abandoned by Adam to a fallen Eden, eating the whole apple by herself, teaching us that we have not survived the Age of Permissiveness, where the sea is language and, as female writers, we inhabit an ocean of suicidal female poets: “Ingrid Jonker’s sea” (Finding Machiavellian Turning Points in Having a Nervous Breakdown). Who can deny this fact? Yet you crave for your mother to SAY she loves you, her gifts of actions are NOT enough (Longing, and on Reading that Sad Story ‘Flowers For Algernon’, Here are Some Thoughts). I was the same, exactly so, where I likewise craved to hear words from my parents that I eventually learned to accept could not and still cannot be articulated by the soft animal that is love. Is that why the following paragraph touches me so deeply?

 

My spirit has evolved because I loved you. On lonely nights I gather this fact of life to myself. […] What is this observation that challenges me to overcome my suffering? (I Don’t Know How to Start.)

 

You write, “I don’t know how to end this on a positive note, so I will end here” (I Don’t Know How to Start) – words which must surely move even the most coolly detached of readers.

And then!

Then you ask. You ask with a directness that jumps beyond words, it’s the gentle curiosity of a wild animal. Cautious, but fearless. The Gentle Curiosity of Woman. You jump, no, you pounce straight to the heart of matter (not “the matter”, just “matter”):

 

As a poet, as an individual, whose joy matters most to you? What is your response to loneliness?

 

Oh, Abigail, thank you for those questions! I want to do nothing more than respond. I want you to know, and I want myself to know that, As a Poet, As an Individual, it is The Voices of The Earth that matter most to me. And my response to loneliness is To Move. To Walk. To Extend a Kindness to Someone. To Make Something Using My Hands. Maybe then, after all, to write (By Hand). For, to be a female who writes, I have learned, I may not prioritise the role of ‘being a writer’. For a writer such as I am – and this is, despite everything I did not want and did not ask for, a destiny of choice – the act of writing must come last of all. For a woman, writing is a verb, not a name, not an identity. Then it is easier done than said.

I see your story as the beginning of The Dance Of Wildflowers In The Wind. Your wildflowers. Your seeds and your planting. For, the way I see it, your hands are clean now. From All The Work – writing and otherwise – which you have done and still do, through the summertimes of your father’s embrace, through the winters of your mother and sister and brother, through your wound’s blooms every spring (Finding Years in Summer Days) through to “the silken smell of autumn” (Let Me Sleep Now in Peace, Please) – a smell my nose is now hunting to harvest!

Love from

Silke

– Silke Heiss, Sunrise-on-Sea, 6^th April 2026

https://www.zamashort.com/2026/03/zamashort-12-did-you-get-married-to-her.html

Abigail George

Mistress of verbal threads and natural laughter

Margaret Clough died this week, at the age of 90. This is my tribute to her.

"What a joy to read your review of my book," she wrote to me in March 2017, continuing with these words: "Reading is one of my greatest pleasures. The best thing about writing is to be able to give that pleasure to other readers. Nothing can make me happier than to hear from someone who likes reading my poems. It is especially great to have praise from you, a poet too and one whose opinion I value highly. Thank you so much!"

Both her joy in writing and giving pleasure to others by means of her poems, as well as her innate gratitude to life, her simple grace and good manners, radiate out of those few sentences. Accompanied by no fanfare other than that of natural laughter, she was a woman of complete integrity. 

I had written an unsolicited review on her self-published book, Portrait in Thread, which she had given to me as a gift in October the previous year.

After having had two titles brought out by Modjaji, At Least the Duck Survived (2011) and The Last To Leave (2014), she self-published, to my knowledge, four more collections, namely, Portrait in Thread (2016), A Pious Pachyderm, Living Locked Down and This is Music (2023). She also wrote plays and short stories, some of which I helped her edit at one time. 

I first met Margaret through Paul Mason, whose informal creative writing sessions on the Cape Peninsula she joined in the 1990s. He recalls her as follows: 

"A beautiful being who enjoyed a long innings. I have wonderful memories of many nights sitting with her and the others at The Harbour Cafe, writing and reading and eating and quaffing. Of course, Finuala [Dowling] picked up the baton from me, which brought Margaret to living her truest creative voice."

Margaret freely admitted that the informal sessions with Paul had been her foundation and springboard, but the guidance she received from Finuala was exactly what her wonderful wit then required.

For this occasion, I'd like to gift readers with my review and re-affirm my praise of Margaret as person and poet. We are blessed to have met you!

Against an automatic cringe

In a recent review of Finuala Dowling's latest poetry collection, Pretend you don't know me, published by Kwela, Reg Rumney writes:

"In an age of self-obsession and poetry as therapy, poet and novelist Finuala Dowling’s work is outward oriented. She makes it her business to have an audience. Her poems talk about what is most painful to us, publicly and privately without inviting voyeurism and she’s not afraid of politics beyond slogans. And she enjoys performing her poems. They are not internal monologues."

Rumney's point is valid and I completely chime with his praise of Finuala Dowling's work. I agree with him that any reader would benefit from possessing a copy of Pretend you don't know me.

However, I would like to invite you to rewind to his words, "In an age of self-obsession and poetry as therapy", going on to imply that, in this 'age', much poetry amounts to no more than "voyeurism" of "internal monologues".

I do not question Rumney's feelings about selfie-type poems. These feelings are perfectly understandable.

Nevertheless, I would like to invite you to look again. 

Yes, there is much preoccupation with the self in recent poetry - the self both in its psychological as well as physical manifestations - during this year, and the last, and perhaps the previous ten to twenty; a trend that was arguably begun by William Wordsworth more than two hundred years ago. To offer my own eye on this trend, I would say there is far more going on than can be simply dismissed as an irritating literary aberration, due to a lack of education among emerging poets as to proper poetic attitudes and style.

Yes, it is exhausting and enervating to plough through hundreds upon hundreds of poems, often imaged as memes by (frequently) young, often love-struck, more often love-starved, psychologically struggling folk, who may be on medication or not, using words as a way to keep themselves from drowning in loneliness, despair, and social neglect. I am not even mentioning the environmental and political crises shadowing the globe. 

And yes, it behoves a critic and reviewer to remind readers and writers of modes of expression that would take them beyond themselves and outside their anguish, no matter how desperate they might be. For example:

"I have sweated metals and fused quicksilver to moonlight.
Equations have haunted my walls in a race against time." - from The Alchemy of you by Jessica Denyschen, in The Magic, The Madness and the Loss, Poetree Publications, 2018 

Even out of context, these "self-obsessed" lines are potent, reaching deeply into self in a formidable and rhythmically utterly convincing way. 

Overall, I would caution protectively against an automatic cringe in response to the search for self in an age that requires and facilitates the individual's search for their own soul more than ever before. I think it was Pearl S. Buck who said that the human soul was the least developed area on earth. If our young writers are searching so, who are we to dismiss the awful - and it is by definition awful - struggle?

Dowling is not a part of the new generation; she is older and wiser and it shows in her writing.

Please do not condemn the young who are going through struggles we oldies will never even taste. I daresay Nuala - yes, I do know her a little bit, well enough to call her so - would be highly unlikely to dismiss emerging poets grappling with their human selves by means of trying to make poems. However poorly for now.

I would go so far as to say that a true poet does not put their craft before their soul. Even if critics and reviewers may at times wish that we do.

For the full review by Rumney, see  Reg Rumney Review of Finuala Dowling  

Review of Staying Hungry by Marike Beyers

Staying Hungry by the ECCA Poets
Hogsback: Ecca, 2019

Staying Hungry is the 2019 anthology published by the ECCA Poets – a group of mainly Eastern Cape writers who put forward the first of these in July 1989, a good 30 years ago! Originating from an art and writers’ group at Fort Hare, Alice, the group has since lost members, but also expanded, including more voices from further afield. Each poet is given a generous portion of the book and, broadly speaking, shares a sense of keen observation of the world and their own responses within it and a concern with expression, mostly in the form of writing itself.

Brian Walter, who recently published a new collection Allegories of the Everyday, opens the anthology. These poems convey a reflective and somewhat mournful tone. Walter subtly interchanges free verse elements with formal structures such as stanzas that echo each other and a quiet rhyme and rhythm, slipping into the concern with poetry-making within the poems: In ‘Marching’ the speaker smiles fondly at children’s choices between the simple rhythm of a school drill and “our fine irony” in poetry. Music and writing poetry are the subject of other poems too; I am particularly fond of ‘Paganini in Helenvale’, a poem in couplets where the rough world of the young people waits on rain and words “hanging in the air / like a fresh sadness” to settle

dripping as the violin bows,

along the gangster pavements

each child here knows.

The poet also thinks about other forms of representing the world and one’s perceptions – ‘Enfolding’ is a longer poem full of the colours of painting. The everyday world of the speaker concerns children trying to find their way in the “gun streets, up and down streets / the old-young men listless streets”, reflections on the past “leaving long shadows”, visiting his mother, feeling wordless with a stranger singing his loss at a bar. “I have no easy words”, the poet says, but shapes his to encounters with others in a dry and gangster world, to bring them “in the sight / of the poetry eye”.

Olwethu Mxoli brings a fresh and direct voice to the page. Her poems speak with immediacy about difficult dimensions of experience. Among these are grief, described as a limb that “just hangs there” and depression. The latter is particularly vivid in the poems ‘Today’ and ‘Being okay’, setting up a self-judgment against an expectation of how one should be. In ‘Being okay’ she uses the line spacing effectively to mimic what is contained emotionally against slipping into spillage when she describes preparing to face the world in dressing with

… a scrupulous headwrap

tied tightly and high to keep all the darkness

from

spilling

out of my

               head

and tainting the sky.

Violence against women is addressed in, among others, ‘Exhibit A’, a poem that presents a trial as an orgy, thereby demonstrating the position of the victim as display case, and ‘Live feed’ that forwards the presence of social media. There is a rage and helplessness in writing about being young and black, an awareness of the precariousness of identity in a world where education goes with a different kind of cultural immersion. In ‘Mother tongue’ she writes about no longer being fluent enough in isiXhosa to relate comfortably with her parents, repeating the unease stanza by stanza, until “I don’t say much anymore”. The poem ‘Blackness’ presents itself as an answer to “You ask me what blackness means”. It is not a comfortable poem, partly because the speaker turns it to interrogate her own position:

At night, in the quiet comfort of suburbia

in my perfect accent

I wonder how black I am

without suffering.

Blackness is also guilt.

It is also apologizing

for not starving.

It is a hard thing to hear, to listen into pain so bound into time and others and self and us as South Africans.

Ed Burle’s contributions are mostly bite-sized observations. There are a few poems where he works his precise observations into a narrative, such as ‘Tren a Barcelona’ about two passengers falling asleep together on a train and ‘Held’, where a moment is stretched into a memory from repeating the opening line “A man leaning in a doorway” stanza by stanza. The short poems sometimes take as subject memory or observations of nature. In my opinion, some of them are so short as to present an image unconnected, almost like seeing a photo from a stranger’s album without context, some even appear to be grammatically incomplete. To me it feels as if they could be starting points to something else, perhaps counter-intuitively given their brevity, to story. ‘Excerpts from a writer’s museum’ seems to bring together some of the concern with memory, the given, and gestures to reach out into an eerie narrative – almost a ghost story. The short poems, close to haikus, work best when they become aphorisms in their succinct wisdom, for example:

Smiling cashier –

no trace of the visions

that bleed through her dreams.

The everyday presented in Silke Heiss’ poems spring from meetings with family, friends, chance encounters, for example a conversation with a cashier at Pick n Pay, and where she finds herself. Her world is filled with people and creatures, all presented as selves – blue cranes “disappeared / their blue selves into the sky”; recovering her health, her mother finds new dignity in the mirror – “the image now / of her lovely old / self” and, finding herself in a home with a boomslang, the poet considers “a space replete with hideouts / for sleek selves”. To me ‘Lessons in hand’ represents the lively interest in the natural world and spontaneous creation of meaning from everyday occurrences prevalent in her poems. Moving around carefully, minding the snake at home, the poet finds the boomslang on a shutter, from where “he turns, leaps / like a graph of himself”. This turning the snake into an image of something drawn, written, continues in her reflections:

Let me read this event

as if I were blind.

Let me like him be feeling

my entire length

a sole – the body one extended foot,

feeding on the Braille

of surfaces.

Heiss, too, recently published a book – Greater Matter, reading meaning and her experiences in the wake of the illness and death of her husband, the poet Norman Morrissey.

Lara Kirsten’s poetry has grown in depth since my previous encounters with her work. She mainly writes in Afrikaans, but there are two English poems among her contributions in Staying Hungry. Of these, ‘stridulate’ offers the English reader a taste of her offerings in Afrikaans, as it also plays a great deal with the visceral experience of sound in writing and performing poetry. The poem introduces a newly learnt word – relating to insects producing sounds by rubbing their wings together –  and with this the poet flies “with its sizzling syllables / right into/ the dusky corner of this poem”. She then expands it into an extended image for the writing of poetry, including onomatopoeia:

woooshhhhhhhh

with resonant surety

the verses begin to rub against each other

and a soft vibration begins to spark the silence

Her poems in this anthology are preoccupied with the need and techniques of writing poetry. She seems to take joy in in-line rhymes and alliterative lines of stacked words rushing forward with an energetic sense of ‘do this!’ Describing her mouth as her tools, her place of industry to make poems, she states her joy as unmatched:

geen groter digtersjolyt!

met net hierdie enkele mond

maak ek my wêreld rond en bont

However, poems like ‘oëverblindery’ and ‘trekkrag’ also question the sources and techniques of poetry – as tricks, on the one hand, and struggle, on the other. Art, Kirsten reflects, does not come from harmony, as people seem to think, but from resistance. Creativity, she insists “moet trekkrag hê / vassuigend, vasstekend / vas geanker in `n hittige halsstarrigheid.”

Jacques Coetzee uses his poetry to reflect on his life, make “accessible at a moment’s notice” memories and moments of selfhood. The poems ask questions about the emotional and personal legacy we inherit from our parents. There are several poems on the deathbed of his father and one can hear the father in the poet’s recall: “One of the last things you said was: ‘Give that boy a chair, he’s in his own way.’” The poet probes his own sense of being in the world in relation to his father:

I can never be quite sure

if it’s me who says yes or no,

who keeps faith or breaks it,

trying always to learn

what it means to call you father in this world,

to call myself your son.

Coetzee’s poems are all in a direct first-person speaker, telling and thinking about incidents in his life – hospital visits, attending a class, listening to the experience of a student, remembering going down a water-slide as a child, facing his graceless response to the man who let him go for free, commemorating love and friendship. The poet often conflates writing poetry and music or song to reach for an inner truth and harmony through art. For example, he holds on to lines from Ingeborg Bachman “as if / they can coax / my timid, over-educated words / into wildness; can hinge me into song” and ends his tribute to a friend with this echo – “because of the songs / that still have to be sung”. The poem ‘Narrow songs’ uses the image of singing to speak about the value of what making art is about (perhaps one can call it getting out of one’s own way):

I bring you these long, narrow songs –

a ladder going inwards and down

…

the steep, narrow ladder of words and music

leading down

into the loneliness and courage

of the body each day.

John van Wyngaard provides a dash of satire, making fun of his ailments in ‘Geriatric rap’ and putting several twists in the oh-so-sincere sphere of poetry events in ‘At the poetry reading group’. The poem ‘Addo’ starts out with a comment on game farm fences – “tall posts, steel cables, electrified / - built to keep the orchards out”, but takes the subject of elephants with a gracious beauty: “They’re a dark shadow breathing together / in all the hard light of this moment” and a respectful acknowledgement of their otherness in the world:

No. Put down your bag

of words and images, and witness this.

They simply are, here.

Elephants, leaning together.

Living the absolute of their own company.

Look.

Other poems on making are ‘On writing a poem’ and ‘Making dress’, seeing the person making it “full of imagining / how this flattened nothing will come to fill out” – visualizing the act of creation. There is a sense of connection with people in Van Wyngaard’s work – the amused presentation of the speaker’s endeavors, the tender ‘To Caro, far away’ on missing his absent beloved in the small details of a day, such as sharing fruit for their muesli and ‘Skin’, dedicated to Norman [Morrissey] on the vulnerability of being alive.

Something of that sense of community between the poets in Staying Hungry is also conveyed in that Heiss gives a poem – ‘Did not blot’ – on the death of Cathal Lagan’s son. “I could hurt // with you, and jot this / down”. Lagan’s poem on this death, ‘You died’, speaks about the presence of the experience of absence:

You died

but the clock still ticks,

mail for you is still delivered

and we half expect

you’re still around

the next corner.

Ending the line on “still around” allows one to read the absence in this renewed sense of loss, as if there was some hide-and-seek going on. Lagan’s other poem ‘Quae est ista?’ uses a liturgical text on Mary to meditate on mystery, on what remains hidden, sealed. Perhaps much of making, poetry, dresses, art and observation is to reach past what remains hidden, sealed and perhaps it is a particular quiet that can also hold what remains sealed before one.

Staying Hungry provides quite a range of poems. Each poet is in effect given about 15 pages of contributions. It occurred to me that this is almost a chapbook of poems per poet published annually and I wondered about the different kinds of affirmation or readings that arise from this mode of publication. Choosing to share work in an anthology requires more cooperation in the production side of it and perhaps remains a supportive platform for the poets who then write and publish as a community. Some of this is suggested by Van Wyngaard’s poem on the mystery (the waiting and wrestling) of engaging with a poem,  serving as a conclusion:

Neither of you can know what you want to say,

Or be, or become, or whether you ever will,

Until it says itself, so some dialogue can play

And conversation begins, and goes on…

Reviewer: Marike Beyers

Curator: Amazwi South African Museum of Literature

The opinions expressed in this review are the reviewer’s and should not be taken to represent Amazwi.

The joy of reviews

I have periodically reviewed volumes of poetry and, at times, novels, too. It is an honour and a responsibility. The more experience one gains, the greater both the honour and the responsibility become.

The reviewer has to be an aunt or uncle to the child that is the book. He or she has to detect and point out things the parent (author) could not perceive. She or he has to nudge or even lead the book towards a friendly and supportive environment (the right readers). A reviewer needs to flag room for improvement, partly in case there may be future offspring, and partly to demonstrate the delicacies of readerly discretion - that beautiful relationship between the thinking self and somebody else's text.

This week I had the joy on one and the same day to receive two reviews that have been produced by two praiseworthy people. Both reviewers show awareness of the job they are tasked with. Both reviews are humble, knowledgeable, sincerely concerned with poetic detail, and balanced in judgment.

Troy Camplin's review is of Norman Morrissey's and my love books (Tryst, 2012;  Learn the Dance, 2013; Hogsback Hiku, 2013; Simply in Love, 2014; To The Far Horizon, 2015; Love Letters To The Earth, 2016; A Shell Held To The Ear, 2017. It excludes The Only Altar, 2018, as I sent him the books prior to that book's being produced.)

Camplin's appreciation is substantial, of the technical details in two of Norman's and my poems, with reference to his own experience as a poet. His receptiveness, furthermore, to the nuances of voice is enlightening beyond the purely technical - it provides readers with the possibilities of reflecting on gender differences as well as relationship dynamics. It is a joy to me to share with you the link to his review, in the hope that you will treat yourself to a full read https://medium.com/@troycamplin/on-the-poetry-of-norman-morrissey-and-silke-heiss-df1f32c85911

Marike Beyers' review of the latest Ecca book, Staying Hungry, too, models the illuminations, which close reading can bring. Her efforts to communicate these illuminations provide both writers as well as readers with her unique thinking feelings - yes: thinking feelings - whereby you are invited to access the varied poems in the collection. Marike's review is not in the public domain just yet, but I will post it on this blog in the next day or two.

    

REVIEW FEATURE: No Addiction to Writing?

Today, I have extracted my review of Marc Schroeder's Sleeping with Dogs from my recent newsletter, in order to give this wonderful read more exposure. Enjoy the write-up and then get yourself the book - it's important for many of us, in different ways. Purchasing details below.

REVIEW FEATURE: No Addiction to Writing?

from Give Your Writing The Edge Newsletter No.45, March 2019

Sleeping with Dogs by Marc Schroeder

Reach Publishers, Wandsbeck, 2018, ISBN 978-0-620-78725-3

You won’t regret it, no. You’ll turn the pages like leaves in the wind and then close the book with a feeling of awe at the young (well, he’s only just over 40!) author’s spirit – his courage, his stamina, his honesty, his humanity and, not least, his uncompromising love of life. I’m talking about Marc Schroeder’s Sleeping with Dogs – a personal (autobiographical) tale of the war of the self against the self, or perhaps more accurately: of the battle to quell the mind’s interminable justifications and rationalisations, by soul’s song finally pulling the human body “into the wild, to where I’d been called for so long.” (pg. 262)

The book begins in 2011, set in Cape Town during the French Open Final, with our ‘hero’ before the television, telling his reader how much he loves tennis, saying things backwards, and the words ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ on his cocaine-buddy’s knickers before he inhales “the snowy trail” she’s offering.

In two pages, we are served (pun intended) it all: an ordinary, South African, sport-loving, fun-loving, straight male, drug-doing self. If you get nothing from this story other than – Here’s someone who knows how to string words together so they pump – it will have been worth your while.

Schroeder uses the tennis match motif as a way of keeping score throughout his journey. As he fights his addiction to various drugs by doing the Ironman race; the Mont Aux Sources Mountain Challenge in the Drakensberg; a cycle ride backtracking the Camino de Santiago to cross Spain and France; going into rehab; joining a church; returning to live with his parents; planning marriage; we see the following –

pg. 59              Addiction 1 – Religion 0

pg. 67              Addiction 1 – Independence 0

pg. 98              Addiction 1 – Ironman 0

pg. 98              Addiction 1 – Rehab 0

pg. 212            Relationships 0 – Addiction 1

pg. 226            Hypnosis 0 – Addiction 1

pg. 243            Psychiatry 0 – Addiction 1

pg. 262            Love 1 – Addiction 0

These scores provide a neat outline of the ongoing skirmishes in the war against what Schroeder calls “the wolves” – whose purposeful, menacing spirit is beautifully captured in the cover artwork by Nicole Goss; indeed, the cover matches the heart of the entire story as could only have emerged out of an artist’s empathy.

The metaphor of the ‘wolves’ effectively conveys the soul’s refusal to lay down arms in the war against unhappiness and self-loathing. On pg. 142 we read:

I was afraid of the harm my soul was demanding from my body.

And 100 pages later:

I believe the further we stray from our life’s purpose the harder life will come down on us, attempting to shake us and bring us back to our true calling. My inability to heed the calls from my spirit resulted in the drugs taking control of my life. I was thirty-six years old. I’d fucked up every relationship I’d ever been in and cared about. I found no purpose or gratification in my chosen vocation [financial advisor]. I was the exact opposite of what I’d hoped for and dreamt for as a child. Yet on paper, I had it all. The sense I had wasted my one life and was continuing to do so, was overwhelming. (pg. 242)

These paragraphs are important for two reasons. First, the words “life’s purpose” and “true calling” reveal the underlying premise of the book. To an attentive reader, the drug addiction turns out, in fact, not to be the main concern – the addiction is clearly showing but ONE POSSIBLE way, in which the wild and purposed instinct (as embodied by the “wolves”) in the author’s own soul refuses to be tamed. (Depression, suicide, crime, addiction to sex, or to gaming, and social and domestic violence could, in my opinion, be other ways of revealing the same existential problem.)

As soon as Schroeder finds himself in the wild, the addiction ceases, because:

My soul was afire. […] I’d fallen in love with the mountain state of mind. (pp. 174-5)

The second theme revealed in the paragraph on pg. 242 is that of honesty. The nasty chasm – between a “paper” life and a real life filled with true soul adventure and opportunity for growth – is more than Schroeder’s body-soul is willing to bridge. In many ways, I read the halt-less drive towards revelry (described in the party, drunken driving and drugging scenes) as a – perhaps unintended – social comment on a culture that is not only too materialistic and fearful for the author’s superficial comforts, but is also deeply rejecting of the Dionysian (ecstatic reveller) and Warrior archetypes – a rejection that may overall hit males harder than females, but which is one the Western world generally has been suffering under for too long.

Adventure, wholehearted lovemaking, dancing (all of which genuinely alter one’s mental state), and self-discovery through physical trials, such as sport offers – all these doings are essential, to a lesser or greater degree, to any human soul. They are embodied in the archetypes of Dionysus (equivalent of the Roman god Bacchus) and Ares (Mars). Dionysus is the Greek god of wine, rowdy festivity, mystic experiences, and spiritual wanderings outside human civility or politics; while Ares is traditionally held to be a bloodthirsty god of war, but, in his most positive aspect, he is also the most sanguine of all the gods on Olympus, outdoing the lot in the arts of dance and lovemaking. (Ares is for good reason Aphrodite’s favourite lover!)^[1]

Sleeping with Dogs is thus, for me, primarily about the bid for those rejected energies to be accepted into the author’s life; even though the author himself does not go as far as to make that explicit. But the dogs of the title, whose loyal love and acceptance of him see him through his most wretched states are, after all, descendants of the wolf. Is it surprising, then, that it is them it hurts him most to give up at the end of the book, in order that he may build a new life for himself in the Himalayas –a life that promises to honour the wild “wolf” inside himself: wolf, that loyal teacher, whose nose follows the ‘inside track’? (In their beautiful handbook on the totem animals of Native Americans, Jamie Sams and David Carson write: “Wolf would not come to you unless you requested the appearance of the tribe’s greatest teacher.” – Medicine Cards, St. Martin’s Press, New York: 1999, pg. 98)

So the score of 1 for Love in the book’s final pages is a score for self-love gained by escaping a milieu totally unsuited to a natural man’s soul. I use the words ‘natural man’ deliberately to echo the concept of ‘natural woman’, beautified by Carole King  – but Men who run with the wolves has yet to be written (though I’d argue that Carl Jung, D.H. Lawrence, and also Robert Bly in Iron John, did give it what they were worth).

 

One score I would dispute is that of 0 for relationships. Schroeder’s criterion is a secure, cosy marriage, and he suffers repeated disappointments in himself for failing to become a stable boyfriend, let alone a husband and father. However, his friendships with men and women alike are remarkable for the shared joie de vivre and total trust that emanates from them – a joy and – dare I say canine – trust that I hazard might well be the envy of many a tired family man worn out by the endless monkey tricks demanded by having to provide for and protect his clan. Schroeder spells it out in a simple tribute to his friend Lisa:

Lisa was anything but mainstream and loved things I loved – music, the sea and, of course, sharing passion through chemicals. I knew it wouldn’t last forever; eventually, one of us would find purpose and move on. However, for those few years, we enjoyed what we had – a wonderful variety of freedom, where we could be who we were without fear of judgment. (pg. 153)

A few of the descriptions of the drug trips at their peak echo the beautifully wrought descriptions of the great outdoors – an echo, which only proves the NEED for the natural altered states Nature in her grandeur provides us with.

Sleeping with dogs is as real as real can be. Run with your own shadow, it seems to say, and you will sleep with your wildest instincts brought into the fold of your inner peace – a peace, which in Schroeder’s case is gained by the highs and lows of outdoor activities and friendships, but perhaps, above all, by the satisfaction of WRITING IT ALL DOWN with an exquisite sureness of rhythm and word choice.

It’s with pleasure that I let this storyteller-sage’s talent flag the end of this review. May his question reverberate in your own hearts – it may well be more pertinent at this stage in our human history than ever before:

I wasn’t aware I was such a fraud, a boat without a keel, a drifting ballast-less at the mercy of the sea and the wind. I knew I wanted love; isn’t that what we’re all looking for? However, how can you love another when you have no love for yourself?

– Silke Heiss

Hogsback

March 2019

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You may purchase Sleeping with Dogs from Amazon.com –

https://www.amazon.com/Sleeping-Dogs-Marc-Schroeder/dp/0620787252

The kindle version costs $9.19 (ca. R135) while the hard copy is $15.99 (ca. R235)

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^[1] Jean Shinoda-Bolen’s books, Gods in Everyman, and its counterpart, Goddesses in Everywoman, offer a Jungian perspective on the major divine figures on Mount Olympus, providing a deeply helpful handle on the possibility for balance and integration of the multitude of different energies, which typically jostle one another in the mixed bag of the human psyche.