Description
Book SynopsisLoving the Dying is a collection of poems on life’s different stages. Set against the backdrop of a conflicted society, Len Verwey looks at a person’s life from youth and growing up to aging and dying, considering what the ineluctable reality of death might imply about how we should think about our lives.
These are poems of uncertainty rather than certainty. The more overtly biographical ones end with as many questions as they start with, and there is often sympathy for the outsider or the marginalized voice. Varying in tone and complexity, Verwey’s poems focus on the tension between escapism and reality, truth and delusion (for individuals and societies), and the need to face death if we are to care for the aged and learn to understand the process of dying.
As in his first poetry collection,
In a Language That You Know, Verwey continues his effort to understand the successes and failures of the South African post-apartheid journe
Trade Review“This is a brilliant, contemplative, passionate collection. Rich with ‘un-’ words—unreceiving, unanswered, undone—it leads us into the unknowable, invents a new country. A poetry of the afterwards, the collection reaches past ‘unconfronted shadows’ and ‘old acrimonies’ and ultimately toward love. No simple tenderness, this love, but schooled in a long knowing, finally earning the coming of ‘something almost imperceptible, unforced, unbidden’ that reveals ‘the wilder wonder of all.’”—Gabeba Baderoon, author of
A Hundred Silences and
The History of IntimacyTable of ContentsI Lit a Fire
Homecoming
The Mind Has a Phone of Its Own
A Boy Like You
Water
I Was Fifteen
Guitar
Ours
Wave
Deveer
The Dead Trees Sing
Even the Damage Kid Is Glum
With the Government Official
The Duration
The Estate in Shambles, a Melodrama
Strange Kingdoms
The Dead Girlfriends
The Sky-Bedazzled, Dark-Bedraggled
The Large River
The Girls of All Hours
Survivors
Trumpet
As I Still Was
Loving the Dying
Acknowledgments
