Seasonal Fires: New and Selected Poems

by Ingrid de Kok

Ingrid de Kok's first book to be published in the United States is also the first volume to demonstrate the variety and continuity of de Kok’s work over the last 25 years. In South Africa and internationally, readers have recognized and responded to de Kok’s deeply developed sense of compassion. South Africa’s most lucid and composed voice in contemporary poetry, she shares her ability to interweave the intensely personal world with the politically panoramic. Ingrid de Kok is one of the few poets to successfully broach the burden of tragedy revealed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings and the ceaseless ravaging of the AIDS pandemic. In doing so, "she captures, in the most delicate and individual terms, devastating phenomena" (Antjie Krog).

Genres: Poetry

192 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2006

Reviews

[Erika B. (SOS BOOKS)]

3.5 stars! Ingrid de Kok was pretty awesome for taking on the Apartheid in her poetry! These are two of my favorites of her poems!

Body Maps

Take the body trace its outline
map its armature
tendons viscera scar tissue
fractures swellings
promises and wishes.
Map age genes place of origin
and love's lineaments.
For mapped onto each body is love.
Take it trace it map it remember.
*****************************************
Kalahari Campsite

In the Kalahari night we wonder at stars-
above us so far, so many, all indelible-
we think we're underneath them, they're in space and time
beyond us, we're small and fleshy and they are adamantine

but then immediately it's raining stars, it's shooting stars
the whole world is stars and nothing else
desert dunes, red sand, wild cats on killing raids
brown-backed hyena at the fire's burnt remains
an owl's alarm call, the patter of ants across stone
we glitter, we rotate, we fall away
we are nothing, there is nothing, but stars

[Avory Faucette]

I heard de Kok read once, and I bought the book. She has a great sort of immediacy - the poems are very to the point, and they depend on visceral emotional responses. Many of the poems in this collection deal with the situation in South Africa and elsewhere on the continent, including Truth & Reconciliation. My favourite is a very simple poem, and it ends like this:

and may the unfixable broken bone

loosened from its hinges

now lying like a wishbone in the veld

pitted by pointillist ants

give us new bearings.

Update: reading this again ten years later, it feels a bit flat to hear a white woman's reflections on life in South Africa, but her language is still quite striking.